Burger King as a brand has long interested me. Ive spent time in Australia where the franchise is instead known as Hungry Jacks. In 1971 the company wanted to make a move into Australia with it's first franchise in Perth but was unable to use the Burger King name as it was already trademarked by an Adelaide based Food Shop. I am currently living in South Africa and Burger King only arrived here in 2013, with it's first franchise opening in the may of that year in Cape Town. This was 18 years after it's competitor Mc Donnalds arrived. Burger King however decided to take a similar tack as Nandos when the South African Company opened in the UK. To differentiate it from KFC, Nandos positioned itself as a higher end brand offering. Burger King used this same tactic when moving into ZA and it seems to be working for them, at least for now, with huge cues outside it's restaurants. That said the company currently have only 12 outlets compared to over 200 McDonnalds franchises. ...
Back in 2011 I attended a presentation by David Butler, Coca-Cola's VP of innovation and he outlined how the company were using revolutionary systems to operate on a global scale. This included designing their vending machines so that they could be easily modified to accommodate the vast stable of brands owned by the company and interchangeable languages for use throughout the world. David's presentation was an inspiration in both business agility and creating modular systems. Coca-Cola have continued to innovate! A little earlier this year Coke announced that they had created the world's first plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based material. Coke partnered with Varent for the project who are creating chemicals and fuels using renewable resources to replace crude oil. With the plant bottle project Varent used BioForming technology that converts starches and sugars found in plants to produce the plastic. Incredibly, the plant bottle feels just like a normal PET plas...
Last year Dan Wieden spoke at Cape Town's Design Indaba conference. Wieden's words have inspired me for many years, so it was a rare opportunity to hear one of the most respected authorities on advertising and creative thinking speak in person. Wieden is probably best know for co-founding one of the worlds most admired advertising agencies; Wieden+Kennedy and coining the Nike tagline "Just Do It." Incidentally Wieden pitched the idea to Nike in 1988 after he had read a newspaper article about Gary Gilmore who was sentenced to death for murder. The condemned man was reported as saying “let’s do this” as he faced a firing squad. Wieden suggested a slightly altered version as the slogan, changing it to "just Do It". The rest as they say is history. In his Design Indaba presentation, Wieden spoke on the importance of allowing yourself to be able to fail and his addiction to Chaos! Many years ago I stumbled across the ' Welcome to Optimism ' blog which i...
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