The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Retail Coffee Pret a Manger

Pret A Manger CEO’s Clubcard alternative – staff can give away free food to customers they ‘fancy’

Author

By John McCarthy | Opinion Editor

April 21, 2015 | 2 min read

Pret A Manger boss has masterminded a customer loyalty scheme alternative to Tesco’s Clubcard or the Nectar Card - he simply has staff give away food and drinks to their favourite customers.

Speaking with the Standard about his plans to build a global brand to challenge the likes of McDonald's, Clive Schlee, chief executive of Pret A Manger, said that loyalty card schemes were not the way forward.

He said: “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis.

“Instead the staff have to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food every week. They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like the guy in that tie’ or ‘I fancy that girl or that boy’. It means 28 per cent of people have had something free. It’s a nice, different way of doing it.”

On his global plans he concluded: “We’d like to be a successful British global company – one that is really successful in different continents and that would be a very worthy goal.”

Pret A Manger was founded in 1984 and in 2014 it sold over an average of one million cups of coffee a week, boasting £594m in sales during that period.

Retail Coffee Pret a Manger

More from Retail

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +