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Beautifully simple: interview with Zanussi

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Written by Tim Barnes-Clay

We spoke with Zanussi’s head of UK marketing Chris George on the brand’s significance for modern families.

With the imminent launch of their Bright range, we wanted to get under the skin of the domestic appliance brand and discover what it means for parents.

How does Zanussi’s vision for 2020 benefit families?

That’s a really good question. I think that when you look at the new products we’ve got within the Bright range, a lot of it’s really oriented towards convenience and simplicity.

What we found with our consumers is that they are less concerned with high design trends and more interested in products that are reliable and robustly made, but also really easy to operate.

They’re looking for technology that isn’t tech for tech sake, which you tend to get a lot nowadays. They want stuff that works time and time again, has consistency of results and just does things beautifully simple.  

What exciting new Zanussi products are coming up?

There are a couple to point out. With our ovens, particularly with our Air Fryer oven, we all have guilty pleasures but at the same time we’re all very conscious of the drive for health, especially with families when you want to be giving them the right things.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to create guilty pleasures without indulging in things like deep fat frying. For example, I’m a big fan of southern fried chicken and I’ve been able to use the Air Fryer ovens to recreate that without any oil. It’s really good creating crispy sweet potato fries, and things like that, that allows you to have something that feels like an indulgence but is actually healthy and a quick convenience. 

Then with our new hob range, it’s just being able to do simple things like, for example, when trying to boil water for potatoes or pasta. You can just leave that to the machine and carry on prepping your veg and know that as soon as it gets to the boil it’ll automatically cut it down to a regular simmer.

It’s simple things that add convenience and allow you to focus on the quality of work you produce. 

Why is corporate responsibility so important?

I think it’s very easy in today’s society to be superficial to try and win consumers over by doing something that’s there for show but not wholeheartedly believed in.

Zanussi is part of the Electrolux Group and that corporate social responsibility goes into our DNA. It’s quite Scandinavian in terms of our ethos anyway. A lot of what we’re trying to do is very family-oriented and one goal we have is to encourage sustainable eating.

We know that, particularly coming from Luton, where our headquarters are, we have a number of boroughs within the local area that are among the most deprived in the UK. There are up to 66 per cent of children in some boroughs that live in poverty, which is terrible.

We put it to the vote to think about what we could do and how we could do it. We really wanted to engage in customer service relations in a more meaningful way. So we started from a local community basis with Cook School and we’re now looking in year two to expand it out in different parts of the country.

But the underlying message keeps coming back to the core of what Zanussi is, which is about showing people that eating healthily and well is simple and easy as long as you understand the fundamentals and you’ve good technology to do it on.  

Read the rest of the article here in the spring ’20 issue.

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