Belt and braces

Six years is a long time to walk a circle, yet that’s how long it’s taken RCapital to walk the circle that is the girth of the Little Chef’s belly. They’ve gone all the way around it to get right back to where it started from. Of course there are a few more holes in his belt nowadays since they’ve slimmed him down in more ways than one and he’s now back on the market 117 sites lighter than he was at the 2007 weigh-in. (See my 2012 post, http://susan-turner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/knowing-your-arse-from-your-elbow.html.)

This team of accountants instigated the most ridiculously inappropriate and unsympathetic repositioning exercise since Consignia, namely, the grafting of Heston Blumenthal’s periodic concoctions onto an enterprise with an established heritage and clientele. An enterprise whose very ‘domesticity’ rendered it perversely ‘exotic’ in an ever increasingly ‘other’ based market.

Only it’s funny, because the “next phase”, according to the Manchester outfit they’ve briefed to rebrand the chain, seems to be the phase before RCapital got involved. It’s about getting “back to basics”. Apparently their approach will be informed by the heritage of Little Chef and what it stands for in the consumers mind. Architecture apart, that means chips, beans and fried toast and not Heston’s fabrications. You don’t say! And all of this pre-sale, which is odd really and it signals acknowledgement that their repositioning has not been as successful as they make out. Sure, they’ve made and saved money. But then they’ve got rid of more than half the chain, haven’t they. But it hasn’t worked. Has it?

It’s all a bit mad really, especially since it’s reported that Starbucks and Costa along with service station brands such as Welcome Break are interested, all of whom would draw the chain into their own brand-world to some extent, so why spend money now? It doesn’t make sense. But then none of it ever did.