Wagamama chief executive David Campbell said that when he took the job in 2013 he saw a “very strong brand that was very much loved in people’s minds, but it felt to me that it had kind of lost a bit of its momentum”.
“I think it was also probably too focussed in the kitchens and not focused in the front of the restaurant and telling people about what it did,” he said.
To change that, Campbell said he invested in a massive market research campaign, interviewing 5,000 customers in the UK and US.
“It’s what drove us, for instance, to do things like take the kitchen from just being a slot in the back of the restaurant, to our most extreme in Uxbridge, putting the kitchen in the front window of the restaurant.
“Now any new restaurant we build, you walk past the kitchen the minute you walk in the door, that’s really important, because people see the food being prepared in front of them.
“For millennials or whatever you want to call that generation of people today, that is far more important than it ever was before.”
Earlier this month M&C reported that Wagamama - which is based in 18 countries - had secured a new flagship London restaurant in Dean Street.
“By the end of the next decade, we definitely want to have created a global brand and in the first instance that’s about growing more in the UK,” he said.
“I don’t think we’ll get to the scale of Pizza Express or Nandos, but we’ve definitely got room to grow in the UK.
“Starting as an urban brand and going into New York got us thinking about London a bit more.
“It started in London, but it really hadn’t opened that many restaurants in London.”
To address that, Wagamama currently has “another four or five” London sites in the pipeline, Campbell said.
“As leases come up, we’ll get out of basements and out of slightly more obscure places and come above ground and recreate the brand as it is today within London.”
Wagamama was also updating its technology offer, Campbell said.
“This calendar year we’ll introduce our own app which will be loyalty driven, it’ll be global, so it won’t matter if you come here or if you go to the States.”
