Pret names marketing chief as chain expands

Alison Steven will lead an enlarged marketing team but unlike Fuller

will not have a seat on the board. Instead, her title will be head of

marketing and she will report to chief executive Andrew Rolfe.

Steven joins from Pizza Hut, where she was new product development

manager for two and half years, responsible for developing brands such

as Stuffed Crust pizza.

Her previous experience includes category brand management at Unilever

in her native South Africa, working on brands including Persil

dishwashing liquid.

Steven’s initial tasks will include recruiting two brand managers plus a

PR chief, and organising market research into the Pret a Manger brand to

find out more about its customer base.

Fuller, her predecessor and formerly account director at Leo Burnett,

left after 18 months with no job to go to. She was quoted as saying the

company needed someone ’more commercially minded’.

Pret a Manager has traditionally focused on its building its brand

through product development rather than advertising, although it has

used poster campaigns on the London Underground created by WCRS. But the

chain, whose tagline is ’passionate about food’, is likely to increase

its marketing spend as it expands its outlets outside London.

According to Steven, brand awareness is strong in the capital but may

need a boost as the chain opens stores in other cities. Of Pret’s 77

stores, just 11 are outside the capital.

’We are still quite a long way off advertising. However, as we open up

new stores outside of London, we may find that people in Manchester, for

example, won’t realise that Pret is a brand rather than a one-off shop,’

said Steven. ’So we will build the brand.’

Pret a Manger was founded in 1986 by entrepreneurs Sinclair Beecham and

Julian Metcalfe, who saw a gap in the market for high quality lunchtime

food. It plans to open between 20 and 30 new stores this year.