Welcome to the Escape Blog

With all the talk of web 2.0 and everything that goes with it, I keep dragging myself into the whole “2″ argument: What does it mean? To me, it is more a way of thinking: Social interaction, rather than features on a website. Here I find myself using the same analogy to describe a brand that I truly admire.

I have suddenly “started a relationship” with one of the UK’s top brands - Innocent Drinks. Already recognised as a success story, I love the drinks and came across a book recently about the Innocent brand by one of my favourite writers, John Simmons. The story of Innocent is inspirational from a business perspective, as well as a branding angle, and well worth reading.

Anyway, this morning I thought I’d go look at their website and of course, they have a blog. Amongst the fun stuff, including an article about an employees three weird phobias, I saw an article about Innocent trialing their fruit smoothies in McDonalds.

Now, they could chase the bucks and just go for it, but obviously they treat their brand and the relationship with their customers seriously (albeit in a very fun way). So, they ask for customer opinion whilst getting across their rationale for doing it.

We’re excited about this as it means we get more fruit in front of kids, but we also know some people may feel a bit funny about us being there, so we wanted to share our thinking…. And we’d love to hear your thoughts.

They also posted a follow up after comments.

I know some people are upset about us doing this. Obviously we would never want that. Our whole business is only possible because of the fantastic support from our drinkers, and I am gutted to lose and upset even a single one. We didn’t make this decision lightly. We even polled our regular drinkers a few weeks ago to ask them about it, and 72% said they would actively like us to be in McD’s, 17% said they didn’t care, and 9% said we shouldn’t be there. We simply wouldn’t have done it if the opposite had been true.

Now, it could just be a PR stunt on their part but how many businesses would even ask their clients how they felt about a particular business move? Would you?

Without trying to sound sycophantic, it’s no accident this company has been so successful. Their attitude, their design, the way they say what they say obviously connects with their audience. That said, I guess it does make it a hell of a lot easier when that attitude comes from the top - the three founders of the company.

The other point to note is that they have a little more freedom to have that relationship with their consumer customers. In the business-to-business arena it is much harder. But, it can be done. And, if you’re the boss, surely yo can get that ball rolling.