the challenge

With the opportunity presented by the development of cloud kitchen businesses, foodpanda launched a new business vertical focused on developing and marketing future in-house brands that would leverage its network of kitchen operators nationwide. Given the fast-paced nature of this tech-driven business, we were retained as the Brand Innovaiton Strategist for the Kitchen & Concepts Team with the target of operationalizing at least 7-10 food brands in the Philippines as part of its short term future.

the work

As the bulk of the team had only a food operations background, the first order of the day was to initiate them and their support departments on Brand Experience Design and Purpose-Driven Brands (“yes, even in food!”).

From here, we were able to institutionalize a few innovation practices including a Design Sprint Kickoff for every new concept brand preceded by Rapid Futurescanning and Consumer Research. The insights generated by this exercise was consolidated into a Brand Experience Design Strategy Canvas developed for the Team from which creative ideas were developed and executed by the Marketing team and their partner agencies.

As an innovation vertical, the business leveraged learning through experiments. This resulted in the launch of prototype brands which served as pointers for the next brand being cooked up in the Foundry. This definitely required stretching the imagination as the business had a limited marketing budget to launch its many brands. While social media was employed, most of the marketing was in-platform. This forced us to go “old school”, including activating cloud kitchen operators to implement grassroots efforts.

the impact

We developed a Brand Innovation process that would serve as one of the key pillars of the Brand Foundry. This included Brand Experience Design Sprints which brought together different teams from support departments to imagine brand futures. A culture of Futurescanning and consumer check ins was also habitualized as part of a rapid research process (weekend ethnography, consumer surveys, trends audits, creative research) as well as generating ideas for marketing executions.