Mark Palmer, Green & Black’s Global Brand Director, has been talking to Paul Gallagher, Freelance Journalist  about how he helped turn Green & Black’s chocolate from a niche product into an international phenomenon.

Green & Black’s has come a long way since its inception in 1991 by the journalist Josephine Fairley and her partner Craig Sams, an organic foods specialist. The pair were inspired by the taste of the cocoa they savoured on a holiday in Belize. Fairley, a chocoholic, frequently returned from foreign assignments to complain that the dark chocolate she found in other countries was nowhere to be found in the UK. Green & Black’s was soon born.

Mark joined the company in 2001 when he moved from Burger King to become marketing director. At the time, Burger King’s turnover dwarfed Green & Black’s so many people may have questioned his decision to switch companies. But Mark had no doubts, knowing a move to a young, entrepreneurial company, would reap dividends.

“My advice to anyone is to work in a business where you can control your own destiny, somewhere you can be accountable and have an influence. That may involve downsizing companies, like I did, and it’s a real challenge for anyone, but you’ll never look back.”

Mark’s initial two years at Green & Black’s were spent working on a major brand positioning, moving from the chocolate company’s niche of its organic roots to a serious player in the premium confectionary market. By 2004, Green & Black’s turnover had jumped from £4.5m to £20m. His team’s efforts were extraordinary and the hard work was paying off.

As Mark explains: “We didn’t have the advertising budget in the early days so we had to take a long hard look at the product and ask ourselves whether it was as good as it could possibly be. I’d suggest that to every company.

“Many companies think throwing money at something, or having a decent marketing budget, is a short cut to success, but that’s a common mistake. There’s nothing wrong with spending money, but it’s important how you spend it. Ultimately, as with anything, it’s the quality of the product that drives everything. There’s no point in marketing something if it’s inferior.

“We spent a long time studying our target market and basically spent two years almost stalking customer groups. The ‘time poor, food rich group’ was particularly important to us. We wanted to know where these people shop, what they buy, which newspapers do they read. Everyone needs a robust case study.”

Focus groups were vital for Mark in getting public feedback. One early challenge was explaining what “organic” meant as it featured so prominently on the packaging. He also discovered many people didn’t like the packaging and that it was giving off the wrong image.

“We wanted to be known as an affordable luxury. People wanted fancy chocolates without the intimidation of going into a fancy shop so we adapted our packaging to reflect that.”

At the focus groups, some people didn’t even want to put it in their mouths confirming Mark’s idea that a great product was being presented in totally the wrong way. The decision was made to take the chocolate out of the organic aisles and place it among mainstream chocolate to compete on its own.

Good PR helped, with an Observer Food Monthly cover story in May 2006 entitled “How a Green & Black’s chocolate bar rescued the families of Belize from ruin” confirming the company’s stance on ethics and sustainability. This was emphasised when Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate became the first product in the UK to carry the fair trade logo.

Observer Food also gave away sample chocolate bars – something it had never done before. That year’s Green & Black’s Easter campaign ran with the slogan “disappoint the kids this Easter”. It was a brave move. But Green & Black’s were not prepared to target consumer groups who did not fit their model and reaped the rewards.

As sales improved, Green & Black’s were in a better position to invest heavily in sampling. In recent years, the company has given away more than five and a half million chocolate bars. “If we have a distinctive taste, then people need to have a chance to try it,” says Mark.

Sampling became a far more powerful tool than advertising.

In 2006, the Independent raved about “the greatest marketing triumph in recent years”. Green & Black’s had “come from nowhere to be the chocolate of choice on the office tea run”.

It took a long time to get there, as Mark, now Global Brand Director overseeing expansion into the USA, New Zealand and Japan, acknowledges: “It took us 7-8 years to get to the level we are at today. We have had a few products that didn’t work out but when we do something new, we try to do it on a small scale so if there are problems, we haven’t lost much time and money on them. So don’t invest too much on a new product, start slow before you build up.”

Today, not only Green & Black’s chocolate bars, but also ice creams, hot drinks, gift chocolates and biscuits, can be found in a wide range of supermarkets, delicatessens, from Harrods to health food stores and sandwich stores such as Pret a Manger, whose founder, Julian Metcalf, Mark considers a business mentor.

“He didn’t spend any money on advertising either so he was a great example of how to build a brand without a big budget. They used their own packaging to optimise their product, just as we then tried to do at Green & Black’s.

“Julian called us one day years ago and, because of the manner of our receptionist who didn’t even know who it was, ended up asking us to sell our chocolate bars in 180 of his stores around the country. So it’s vital to make the first point of contact as good as possible as you never know who might be calling.”

This interview and article was commissioned by Inside Business and is copyright protected.

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Businesses that fail to see the value in communicating their corporate strategy and objectives with their existing customers are missing out on a golden opportunity to develop stronger relationships. Surely, argues Cris Beswick from Let’s Think Beyond and David Gallagher, B2B Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, all businesses should be striving to achieve this in tougher economic times.

You don’t need to read another article about whether we’re officially in a recession or not. Your brain starts to switch off the minute people preface their first sentence with ‘credit crunch’. And quite frankly, you’re sick of seeing the ‘top ten tips to marketing your way to success in an economic downturn’ that appear on virtually every blog, business page and unsolicited email you receive. Like it’s that easy.

So if you’ve read this faar you’ll be pleased to know this isn’t another of those articles. Because we think your time is more important than that. And ours certainly is.

Most businesses we work with, whether in the good times or the bad, are more focused on growing by attracting new customers. Develop the right products, target the right customers with the right messages in the right media and of course that is more than achievable. It’s good marketing practice after all. But few businesses we work with have anything that remotely resembles a strategy for increasing value from the existing client base. And even less have an overall strategic vision that their core stakeholders – employees and customers – can articulate.

Focusing time, effort and resource on your existing client base makes economic sense in any type of economy. By thinking more innovatively and more creatively, businesses retain existing customers, encourage them to cross and/or up sell and protect their revenue streams from the predatory new business activity of competitors. But such thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen by attending a residential training course. It fails to permeate an organisation if only a handful of senior people buy in to the concept.

To create the right culture in a business, one that embraces creativity and innovation from the shop floor to the boardroom door, takes time. Done well, however, return on investment is always guaranteed and once a tipping point is reached, the new culture becomes self-perpetuating and sustainable. Business leaders need to be able to understand how their employees think, how they can be motivated, how to develop an entrepreneurial zeal and what will inspire them. By doing this, teams and individuals become more engaged and more productive. They get under the skin of their customers. They develop products to meet the future needs of customers. They develop needs that the customer sometimes didn’t even realise he had.

An innovative and creative culture doesn’t just stop at the factory door. Such businesses actively interact with and engage their customers to help them develop new products or new services. After all, if business leaders can see value in asking staff for their ideas, comments and opinions, it makes obvious sense to ask the same of their customers.

Ok, so we promised no ‘ten tips’ and we’ll stick to that promise. Improving the value of your existing customer database, what we have termed Old Business Development, can be undertaken by sole traders to multi-national organisations. Below is a roadmap for Old Business Development that we use to help our clients. Begin following this framework and your organisation will already be well ahead of many of the competitors in your industry.

1. Define relevant, strategic objectives
2. Get the whole business to engage and buy in to them
3. Begin to work on changing the culture of the business to make it more innovative and creative
4. Communicate internally to align the new culture to the company’s vision
5. Communicate externally to demonstrate how the new culture and strategy better understands and meets the needs of existing customers

Once you are on the journey it is vital to communicate it to both employees and customers. It shows confidence in your business, it shows how you are forging ahead of competitors, it shows where and how the business will grow and it identifies strategic opportunities that will be exploited. we have found that even businesses that have started such a journey, and are making headway, can forget about the importance of communication. In such instances it is often left to an individual or group in the organisation, not expert communicators with the added pressure of their days jobs to contend with. By not prioritising it to the same extent as strategic planning or cultural change, the quality of communication can be poor at best, non-existent at worst. As a result the full benefits of Old Business Development are left unrealised as employees disengage and customers become confused.

With more money and resource required to correct such a situation, isn’t it just simpler to do it right first time?

Cris Beswick is the Principal of Let’s Think Beyond, which helps businesses unlock their inherent creativity and innovation to deliver tangible commercial results.

David Gallagher is a Senior Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, a business communications agency.

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