SilverChef overhauls brand with new tagline to inspire entrepreneurs

A brand overhaul was overdue for SilverChef, which provides equipment finance to help hospitality entrepreneurs grow their businesses, as part of a 'recalibration' of the 30-year-old business.

As the company expanded over the years, for example, each new brand saw it adding a new logo.

“We tended to just bolt elements on top without ever looking at the brand and asking if we needed to overhaul it,” SilverChef global marketing manager, Jamie McCalman, told CMO.

So one of the goals was to remove the sub-brands and refresh the main brand, which didn’t work well for online and digital.

“We wanted to become more digitally enabled and we just couldn’t use the old brand in that environment,” McCalman said.

SilverChef didn’t leave much to chance in shaping its new identity and campaign, undertaking meticulous research and analysis, starting with Colmar Brunton conducting one of the largest reports of its kind into its target audience. This was followed by Google surveys to expand certain aspects of the research and out of all this work, a completely new brand blueprint was created.

The company now boasts a detailed customer experience (CX) map for its hospitality owner customers along with archetypes and buyer personas.

Meanwhile the rebrand, led by Brisbane agency, Nick Did This, sees a new logo and brand identity for everything from brochures to digital advertising. The group has also rolled out three new ecommerce websites to support a new direct-to-customer experience across Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

“We were trying to appeal from an emotional perspective, not to take anything away from the product and its benefits, but to appeal to their emotions,” McCalman said.

The brand mission was to find a tagline that expressed a positive, can-do message inspiring to hospitality business owners  often striking out on their own to follow their dreams. SilverChef’s new tagline, ‘Don’t Dream, Do’ underpins its full brand refresh, refocusing the brand on its core purpose of helping hospitality entrepreneurs across Australia, New Zealand and Canada achieve their business dreams.

McCalman said 'Don’t Dream, Do' celebrates the bravery and ambition of hospitality entrepreneurs, demonstrating SilverChef’s support for them as they pursue their dreams. SilverChef has also chosen to ‘hero’ real customers as the faces of its brand. Nodo's Kate Williams and the team behind Mongrel are SilverChef’s first brand ambassadors, with more to be introduced as part of upcoming campaigns.

“It works across so many elements and we’re really building equity in ‘doing’ and what you can ‘do’ and it’s both external for the customers and with our own internal messaging for our staff and the business,” McCalman said.

It has been a period of change for the company, which was recently acquired by private equity. The refresh was able to function both as an end-point to that period of change and as a starting point that signalled a new era, he said.

“When the due process finalised we were able to go out with a new brand and they were really supportive of the new brand and new assets, and our recalibration,” McCalman added.

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