Cooking up ways to connect

Finding more and deeper ways to connect with customers is a quest for all retailers.

If you do your Christmas shopping in central London and walk up Regent Street, along Oxford Street or around Covent Garden you’ll see some splendid manifestations of this pursuit - Hamleys, Apple, Nike Town.

And there are plenty of other examples in towns and cities across the land. What the most successful are doing is bringing their brand to life. They are creating positive experiences for their customers that enrich the simple act of purchasing.

Reduced to its basics, retailing is pretty simple. We find stuff customers want, put it on shelves and websites, and sell it. And in these economic times, perhaps we should expect increasing numbers of customers to go online, check the comparison websites and always go for the cheapest - the commoditisation of shopping.

But we know this isn’t the universal trend and, as well as quality and service, many people are looking for something more. Good value will always be important but experience and emotional connection have become important ways of differentiating your brand.

That’s why, earlier this month, we became the first supermarket to open a dedicated cookery school. Based in a fabulous space above our Finchley Road branch in London, the school is the culmination of a 10-year dream for the business and one that we hope will cement even stronger bonds with our customers.

We have recruited a great team of chefs to run the courses and help us inspire customers to get cooking. We want to build enduring relationships with our shoppers, so what better way to do that than helping them shine in the kitchen. At the heart of this is our business belief that an appreciation of food is a good, life-enhancing thing.

There is real joy in what Sir Roy Strong has described as the “flawless spectacle” of a well-prepared meal. Now I’m not talking about visiting a favourite eatery and letting someone else take the strain, as fantastic as that can be. The “flawless spectacle” that I’m so enthusiastic about is the one toiled over and then devoured at home in the company of appreciative friends and family (hopefully).

For several decades, as food and culinary skills disappeared from the curriculum in our schools, cooking became just a spectator sport with millions tuning in each week to witness charismatic cooks and chefs at work. But the emotional desire to (as Nigella so memorably described it recently) “surrender yourself to the warm embrace of the kitchen” is powerful.

That’s why we’re serious about making this connection with our customers. Whenever they go on a cookery school course or make their Christmas cake with Delia’s Prepared Ingredients pack, pick up a recipe card in one of our branches or download the latest cooking tips, they are relating to us in a way that adds value to that simple transaction of buying the weekly groceries.

Mark Price is managing director of Waitrose