ShakeAway: ingredients of a cult youth brand

Luke Mitchell looks at the growth of ShakeAway and wonders what makes the milkshake outfit so appealing to youth.

Opening of ShakeAway Hastings. Photo: facebook.com/shakeawayhastings

ShakeAway sell milkshakes and their success fascinates me.

I first noticed them when I lived in Brighton eight years ago. On Saturday mornings I would pass their shop, with its loud signage and blasé use of feral yellows, and wonder why it was always so busy.

The queue would usually run out of the door, and was exclusively comprised of effervescent young adults.

Fast forward to 2010 and ShakeAway has arrived in Hastings. Its coming was heralded by dozens of teens who sat outside the closed shop on a nippy autumn morning, waiting for its doors to open and the chance to claim a free shake.

This brand does little advertising. It is unrecognized and unknown by most outside of the towns where it has shops (has anyone in London heard of ShakeAway?). Yet a large number of youths in Hastings knew that sitting on a cold, guano-covered pavement for a paper cup of sweet iced milk would be worth it.

ShakeAway has something special. But what?

The five dollar shake

“I gotta know what a five dollar shake tastes like,” says Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Clearly he hadn’t visited a ShakeAway, where a regular would cost him the equivalent in sterling.

Yes, it’s impressive that ShakeAway manages to extract £3 to £4 from the tight pockets of its customers for each milkshake. These cash-conscious fanatics could refresh themselves in McDonald’s or Costa and still have change for the bus home. Yet they choose ShakeAway because, says co-owner Rob Hazell, they get a high quality product in an environment they want to spend time in: “With the youth audience, you cannot get away with charging through the nose for rubbish”.

Sidenote: ShakeAway is popular choice of study for GCSE Business Studies students, who look at the composition of a shake – with its use of natural ingredients, such as real banana rather than syrup, and branded confectionary such as Skittles or Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut – and conclude that the product is fairly priced.

A longtail menu

Wired’s Chris Anderson identified the phenomenon of the long tail and told us in his book that “the future of business is selling less of more”. Take a look at ShakeAway’s menu and you might wonder if they saw an advance copy.

They serve hundreds and hundreds of mind-bending flavours, from blackcurrant cheesecake and Terry’s Chocolate Orange®, to peanut butter and Farley’s® rusks. And there isn’t one flavour that rules. They all sell.

There are also fourteen special blends, which use the likes of espresso coffee and Jamaican ginger cake, and have names, for no good reason  [see comment below] such as Teresa or Simon.

The shakes are created by ‘Shakettes’. While they shake them, customers can play table football and listen to the music from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Lloyd Daniels.

When ShakeAway approached foolish bank managers in 1999 to get a start-up loan, they were told they had a dumb business idea.

Authenticity

Being real, not fake. Not trying too hard. Having substance above style. Being honest and transparent. In youth marketing today, brands are told they need to be all these things. They need to be authentic to win attention.

“We like taking the mickey out of ourselves,” says Rob Hazell. “We don’t take life too seriously and we try to be simple, friendly and unpatronising. Despite growing to over 50 shops now in the UK, we strive to never become corporate and boring.”

As well as turning the old idea of a milkshake on its neck, they challenge the expectations of takeaway too. “In staff training, our emphasis is on engaging the customer as an individual and spending some time with them. Our culture is not to think of shifting 400 shakes in one day; it’s to think of serving 400 individuals who are only going to have one milkshake that day, and making sure they receive unique service.”

ShakeAway’s unpretentious, fun sensibility is evident in their visual communications, which also reek of real. ShakeAway look like what they are: a small café in Dorset run by two guys that had a wacky idea, evangelized it, attracted followers and grew very quickly (they have now branched out into Ireland, Australia, Cyprus and UAE). Their brand identity is damn fugly, yet somehow it embodies the goofy spirit of the firm with an accuracy and honesty that Wolf Olins could never achieve. Given the task of creating a mascot for the brand, what agency would be straightforward enough to look no further than the paper cup that holds the frothy beverage, give it some arms and some legs and call it ‘Cup Man’?

Zero ad spend

Interestingly, ShakeAway have also proved ahead of the zeitgeist when it comes to ad spend. They don’t bother. Instead they focus on developing relationships with their customers through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and by using PR initiatives to reach the demographic. “We’ve never been fans of buying advertising,” says Rob Hazell. “It’s expensive and it’s difficult to gauge success. Our customers don’t read the local paper. They pick up a magazine, flick through and drop it. So we use social media and we involve customers in the content. Our competitions are very popular. We create exciting prizes that money couldn’t buy – a day out at the London Dungeon with Scott Mills, learning how to be scary.”

The revival of the hang out

Photo: Gerry Balding

Young people like to socialize together in public spaces. They often claim a particular venue or location as their territory. One of the best known examples in UK youth culture were the milk bars, popular in the 1940s and 50s, and again in the mods’n’rockers era, and a fictional turf for Alex’s droog gang in A Clockwork Orange. In the milk bar young people would hang out, chat, laugh and listen to music, escaping repressive, adult-dominated atmospheres. ShakeAway offers some similarities to milk bars, and not just in its dairy-based menu. The environment they create is designed with the young customer in mind. It’s bright, it’s loud (they play their music louder than any shop) and it has fun games. Music is a careful mix of current chart hits, cheesy classics and novelty records. Perching stools are provided – the perfect furniture for transient youth (saying: ‘I’m here – but I might leave any minute’).

I still haven’t tried a five dollar shake. I tried to visit my new local shop, but it was rammed. On a week day.

With the recent relocation of Sussex Coast College into the town centre and the continuing growth of the University of Brighton’s UCH, this was probably a good time to bring ShakeAway to Hastings.