Mudbrick, on Waiheke Island, hosted my 40th birthday. It was also recently awarded a Michelin star, one of sixty New Zealand restaurants recognised at the country’s first Michelin Guide ceremony, alongside Ahi, Paris Butter (another personal favourite), Tala and Tantalus Estate in Auckland, and Amisfield, Essence, Rātā and Sherwood further south. Essence in Queenstown received the only two-star award in the country. The coincidence of personal preference and independent recognition is a useful entry point into a broader question: what does a Michelin star do to price?

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The economics of Michelin

The relationship between Michelin recognition and menu pricing has been studied directly. Craig Lee (North Carolina State University), Julianne Treme (North Carolina State University) and Tommy Weiss (The University of Kansas), writing in Applied Economics Letters (2023), constructed a data set of 2,832 observations covering every French and British restaurant that held three-star status between 1953 and 2019. Using a hedonic pricing model with location and year fixed effects, they estimated the marginal effect of each additional star on real menu prices.

Their results indicate that earning a first star increases real menu prices by approximately 30 percent relative to an unstarred restaurant. A second star adds a further 30 percent. A third star adds an additional 25 to 30 percent on top of that. All coefficients were statistically significant at conventional levels. The authors’ interpretation is that stars function as a quality signal that shifts consumer willingness to pay independently of any change in the underlying meal.

Joël Robuchon, the most decorated chef in Michelin’s history, is widely quoted as estimating the revenue effect in similar terms: roughly 20 percent more business for one star, 40 percent for two, and close to a doubling for three. This figure is cited frequently in industry commentary. It has not been independently verified against a primary source here and should be treated as illustrative rather than empirical.

Neither data set includes New Zealand. The mechanism they describe, however, does not depend on geography. It depends on scarcity and independent verification, both of which are present in the New Zealand result in comparable form: sixty restaurants recognised out of several thousand operating nationally.

Trust, culture and scarcity as explanatory mechanisms

The pricing effect documented above is best understood through three related mechanisms rather than one.

The first is scarcity. A fixed, deliberately small number of awards concentrates demand on a narrow set of venues, and demand concentrated on a narrow supply produces a price premium independent of any change in cost.

The second is trust. Michelin’s authority derives from a century of anonymous, independently funded inspection, with no sponsorship arrangement and no algorithmic submission process. This is structurally different from most contemporary rating systems, which are vulnerable to manipulation, paid placement or model-generated content at near-zero marginal cost. A rating that cannot be purchased or automated carries a different evidentiary weight for the consumer, and that weight translates into willingness to pay.

The third is culture, understood here as the accumulated, non-transferable judgment of a specific chef, place and moment. Artificial intelligence has reduced the marginal cost of producing content, forecasts and even menu design. It has not reduced the marginal cost of independent, embodied evaluation, which remains the basis of the Michelin star. This is the component of the market that automation cannot compress, and it is likely to become more, not less, valuable as automated alternatives multiply.

The Kiwi Impact

The New Zealand result should be read as a natural experiment rather than a settled outcome. No New Zealand-specific pricing study yet exists, and any projection from French and British data carries the usual caveats about market comparability. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the conditions the existing literature associates with pricing power, scarcity and verified trust, are now present in the New Zealand hospitality market in a form they were not before this month. A measurable price effect, consistent in direction if not necessarily in magnitude with the international evidence, is a plausible outcome for the venues concerned.

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MYOB read that as a brand opportunity. With 34 years of heritage behind it, and Xero having pulled business owners away from the accountant-led model, MYOB built Solo: a mobile-first product for Australia's 1.6 million sole operators. The people running a business on spreadsheets, paper receipts, and a bank account they share with their personal spending.

The win came from listening to real people. Sally Davies, GM of Solo and Embedded Finance, walked the Inverloch Christmas markets and stopped at every stall, asking owners how they worked and what hurt. That is where the real problem surfaced: people turning over good money who did not believe they were running a business. No brief would have found it.

Sally Davies and Lia Pacquola, who leads strategic comms, join Ben to walk through what they did with that insight. The endorser brand decision. Running Solo like a startup inside a 34-year-old company. Naming a mental state instead of a feature set. And why a Valentine's Day campaign about loneliness moved a piece of accounting software.

What this episode covers:

• Why a category people dislike is a brand waiting to be rebuilt

• Human-led research, and the problem a spreadsheet would never find

• The endorser model: what Solo carried from MYOB and what it deliberately left behind

• Imposter syndrome as positioning, validated across 550 sole operators

• AI as practical utility, not a branding exercise

• Embedding comms alongside product from the first day, not after the build

• Finding the human tension on any budget

Chapters:00:00 The category people love to hate
02:43 Meeting Sally and Lia at ComsCon
04:08 Their roles at MYOB
05:17 34 years of heritage: asset and weight
07:07 Where accountants fit with Solo
08:20 A category under disruption
10:12 Marketing to the owner and the accountant
11:44 Social channels and influencers
12:02 AI as a proof point, not a slogan
13:58 Focusing on the user, not the feature list
14:23 The customer who doesn't think she runs a business
17:01 Building Solo like a greenfield startup
18:53 The endorser brand decision
20:50 How Solo is performing
23:43 The Valentine's Day campaign
26:10 Naming the imposter state
28:50 Brand or product: what drove the result
29:44 Soulmates: community by design
31:17 One takeaway for any brand
32:22 Doing it without a big budget
33:40 The Inverloch markets method
35:49 Ben's closing thoughts

Ben on Brand. Where leaders discuss the strategies that drive business growth. Hosted by Ben van Rooy, CEO and Founder of Human Digital.

New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more on brand strategy, marketing, and the decisions that define them.

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Ask anyone outside Australia to picture Sydney and the same images surface: Bondi Beach, the Sydney Opera House, a harbour glittering in summer sun. That perception was not accidental. It was the product of decades of tourism marketing built around warmth, coastline, and outdoor spectacle. Sydney sold summer, and summer sold Sydney.

The problem with that proposition is that it left half the calendar year largely undefended. May and June were shoulder months: cold enough to keep people home, warm enough that nobody felt the theatrical pull of a proper European winter. Hotels discounted. Restaurants emptied early. The harbour sat dark by seven.

Then came Vivid Sydney.

What started in 2009 as a low-energy light walk around Circular Quay has become, by most measures, the largest festival of light, music and ideas in the world. In 2024, more than 2.5 million people attended and the festival generated over $180 million in visitor expenditure across NSW. The 2025 edition drew more than 1.2 million visitors in its opening week alone, roughly 10 per cent ahead of the same point the prior year. At that scale, the festival functions as economic infrastructure.

The transformation from niche cultural curiosity to major economic event did not happen by accident. It happened because Vivid made a brand decision early and stuck to it: winter was not a constraint to manage but a backdrop to own.

The Brand Logic

The original concept, developed under the working name “Smart Light Sydney,” was modest in ambition. A low-energy light walk. A sustainability statement wrapped in spectacle. The renaming to “Vivid” is instructive. It dropped the technocratic framing and chose an emotional register: vivid as in sharp, alive, present. That choice has held for seventeen years without revision.

From the beginning, the festival was structured around three pillars: Light, Music, and Ideas. This is architecturally smart. Each pillar serves a different audience. Light is accessible, photogenic, family-appropriate, and free at the core. Music fills venues and drives ticket revenue. Ideas, through the Vivid Ideas Exchange at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, positions the festival as a platform for serious thinking, not just spectacle. The combination means Vivid speaks to a remarkably broad demographic without losing coherence: three distinct audience entry points anchored by a single, legible brand idea.

The Sydney Opera House projection is the brand’s flagship asset. It takes eleven months to produce. It has been posted to Instagram 26,000 times in a single year. The Sails are the most recognised architectural canvas in Australia, and Vivid has made them synonymous with the festival. When people think of Vivid, they see the Opera House. That level of brand anchoring is rarely achieved and almost impossible to replicate.

The Commercial Trajectory

The numbers tell a straightforward story of compounding scale.

In 2012, Vivid attracted 500,000 visitors and contributed roughly $10 million to the NSW economy. By 2013, attendance had grown to 800,000 and economic contribution doubled to $20 million. In 2017, 2.33 million people attended and the festival injected $143 million into visitor spending. By 2019, attendance had reached 2.4 million and overnight visitor expenditure hit $171.9 million. In 2024, both figures moved again: 2.5 million attendees and more than $180 million in visitor spend.

That growth line has held despite the pandemic years erasing 2020 and 2021 entirely. The festival came back and kept climbing.

Each year, the footprint expanded. New precincts were added: Darling Harbour, Taronga Zoo, Surry Hills, Barangaroo, Martin Place. The festival extended from 18 nights to 23. Vivid Food was introduced in 2023, adding a fourth pillar and extending the festival’s reach into hospitality. Every expansion created new entry points and new revenue categories without diluting the core.

This is disciplined brand extension. Not everything gets added. The additions that do make it share the festival’s fundamental proposition: transformation of the city through creativity.

What the City Got Right

Destination NSW, which owns, manages and produces the festival, made an early and consequential decision: Vivid would be a public event at its core. The light walk is free. The projections on the Opera House are free. The city itself becomes the venue.

That decision created the attendance numbers. Attendance numbers created the hotel occupancy rates. During the 2025 festival period, Sydney recorded its strongest May hotel occupancy since 2019, peaking at 89.1 per cent across the city. That is a remarkable number for a month that historically underperformed. The festival did not just fill hotel rooms; it restructured the seasonal economics of the entire CBD.

The broader ripple effects are well documented. “People then go out to eat, they use public transport, taxis and all those incidental services,” as Ray White’s head of research Vanessa Rader noted in a May 2026 analysis of the festival’s commercial impact. “There’s a much broader economic impact attached to these big events.” For hospitality operators in waterfront and CBD precincts, Vivid encourages longer dwell times and discretionary spending from a demographic mix that few events can replicate: families, tourists, office workers, couples, groups. Each spending in different venues, on different categories.

It also created a social media asset of extraordinary scale. The #vividsydney hashtag reached 621.7 million people in 2019, audience-generated distribution at a scale no paid media budget could replicate. The festival’s instagrammability is not incidental to its brand strategy; it is part of it.

The Lesson for Anyone Building a Brand

Vivid operates as a belief system about what a city can be, with the commercial outcomes following from that clarity.

Vivid Sydney sells Sydney in winter. The festival took a structural disadvantage, an off-season with nothing compelling to offer, and turned it into an annual event that international travellers book around. That required a strong brand idea, consistent execution, and the discipline not to let expansion fragment the proposition.

Most event brands fail because they mistake growth for brand equity. Vivid grew by adding pillars that served the core idea. Each addition, Music, Ideas, Food, reinforced the same central claim: that creativity transforms ordinary space into something worth travelling for.

Seventeen years in, the brand is the festival. That is what compounding looks like.

B2B marketing has a reflex. When it’s time to launch a product, the playbook kicks in: features first, functionality second, compliance third. Then hand it to comms and ask them to “get some coverage.”

It’s tidy. It’s familiar. And it caps your ceiling before you’ve even started.

Two companies in the same category are showing what happens at either end of that spectrum. One is the market leader, going broad, pumping marketing spend while its product and UX quietly stagnate. The other is a former incumbent that lost its crown and is doing something far more interesting to earn it back. The results are worth paying attention to.

Broad vs. niche: the Xero and MYOB divergence

For anyone who’s been around the Australian and New Zealand accounting software market, the history here matters. MYOB was the market leader. For years, they owned the category. Then Xero came along, went cloud-first, executed brilliantly, and took the crown. It’s one of the best challenger brand stories in the region.

Then they won. And something shifted. Xero has spent recent years positioning itself as the default cloud accounting platform. Broad market, broad messaging, broad brand. The marketing machine keeps running. The billboards keep going up. But when you talk to the people actually using the product every day, there’s a growing gap between the brand promise and the product experience. The roadmap feels like it’s treading water. Features that users actually care about stay parked while the company chases scale and promotion.

That’s where vanity creeps in. Vanity metrics, vanity features, vanity positioning. The brand looks great from the outside, but the substance underneath isn’t keeping pace.

Meanwhile, MYOB has been quietly doing the opposite. Instead of trying to win back the broad SME market with a louder version of the same playbook, they went niche. With Solo, they zeroed in on one audience: Australia’s 1.6 million sole operators. Freelancers, tradies, side hustlers, celebrants. People running real businesses who don’t always feel like they’re running real businesses. And instead of leading with what the product does, they led with what that audience actually feels.

It’s a challenger move from a former incumbent. And it might be exactly the right one.

Culture first, category second

At Mumbrella CommsCon yesterday, MYOB’s Lia Pacquola (GM of Strategic Communications) and Sally Davies (GM of Solo) walked through how they built the product and brand together over two years. What stood out wasn’t the campaign creative or the media results, though both were strong. It was the operating model.

Their comms team wasn’t briefed on the product after it was built. They helped shape it. Product, design, tech, comms, and marketing all ran as one squad from the start, before a line of code was written. Shared objectives. Shared scorecard. One team, not a relay race.

That matters because of what they found when they went deep on their audience. Sole operators are time poor, overwhelmed by admin, and doing their bookkeeping at midnight. But the insight that changed everything wasn’t operational. It was emotional. These people have a confidence gap. They’re turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but telling themselves they’re “just building fences.” They feel like they’re playing business rather than doing business.

Those aren’t feature insights. They’re cultural insights. And they’re far more powerful.

When MYOB anchored in culture rather than category, three things happened. Relevance improved because they were speaking to real tensions, not product specs. The brand moved out of the B2B niche and into mainstream conversations about work, wellbeing, and self-employment. And the product itself got sharper, because starting from cultural tensions forced the team to define the real problem before building the solution.

Bedmin and the one-handed test

One of the strongest moves in the Solo launch was a campaign called “Bedmin.” The insight was simple: sole operators are doing their admin from everywhere. The couch, public transport, between jobs, in bed at 11 pm. They need a product that works one-handed, on a phone, while they’re juggling kids or halfway through another task.

That insight came from the comms team’s cultural research: hours on TikTok and YouTube, watching how sole operators actually live and work. It then shaped concrete product decisions. Mobile-first design. One-handed UX. Admin on autopilot. The campaign and the product were built from the same insight at the same time.

This is where the contrast with the “go broad” approach becomes stark. When you know exactly who you’re building for, every decision gets easier. You don’t need to debate whether to build for mobile or desktop. You don’t need to guess what language will resonate. You’ve spent two years in the world of your user. You know they’re doing invoices with one hand while holding a toddler with the other.

The result was national media coverage, fronted by a real customer (a marriage celebrant already on the platform), not a spokesperson reading talking points. An actual user whose life matched the narrative, because the narrative was built from real life in the first place.

From campaign to platform: imposter syndrome

MYOB didn’t stop at one campaign. The cultural research surfaced another tension: sole operators feeling like impostors in their own businesses. So they built a follow-up campaign around imposter syndrome, directly naming the feeling their customers described.

This is what happens when your comms function isn’t just a distribution channel. When cultural insight feeds continuously into product and positioning, each campaign builds on the last. The brand compounds. You’re not starting from scratch every quarter with a new message about a new feature. You’re deepening a relationship with your audience around something they actually care about.

Compare that to the alternative: a new brand campaign every six months, each one disconnected from the last, each one trying to generate awareness without building anything underneath it. That’s the difference between brand building and brand spending.

Product is the brand. Don’t forget it.

Here’s what the “go broad, spend big” approach misses: in B2B, your product is your most important brand asset. When users interact with your software every day, no amount of marketing can paper over a mediocre experience. If your roadmap is driven by vanity features (things that look good in a press release but don’t solve real problems), your best customers will notice. And eventually, they’ll leave.

This is the risk Xero is running. When you’re the market leader, it’s tempting to believe your brand is the moat. But brand without product innovation is a depreciating asset. The customers who chose you because you were the better product will choose someone else when that stops being true. And they won’t announce it. They’ll just quietly switch.

MYOB understood that the product and the story had to be the same thing. Every feature in Solo exists because the cultural research said it needed to. One-handed use. Mobile-first. 17 hours of admin saved per month. Those aren’t marketing claims bolted on after the fact. They’re design decisions that came from understanding the user deeply enough to build something that genuinely fits their life.

Solo hit 30% above its customer growth targets. It generated over a million dollars in earned media value and 10 million impressions. It won The Australian Financial Review 2025 Most Innovative Company award for financial services.

None of that happened because they outspent the competition. It happened because they out-understood them.

The takeaway

Market leadership is never permanent. Xero proved that when they took it from MYOB. Now, while Xero rests on its brand and relies on marketing to do the work that product should be doing, MYOB is quietly building something that might shift the balance again. Not by outspending them. By out-understanding their users.

If your B2B brand is struggling for cut-through, the problem probably isn’t your product and it probably isn’t your marketing budget. It’s probably that you’re going broad when you should be going deep. Or leading with category language when you should be leading with culture.

Find the specific audience that nobody else is obsessing over. Understand what they actually feel, not just what they need. Build the product and the brand from that insight at the same time. And bring your comms people into the room before the spec is written, not after.

Niche isn’t small. Niche is sharp. And right now, sharp is winning.

Ben van Rooy is CEO and Founder of Human Digital and co-host of Canned the Marketing Podcast. With over 20 years in brand and marketing strategy across New Zealand, Australia, the US, and the UK, he works with businesses that want smarter growth, not just more of it. He holds an MBA from Brown University and the IE Business School.

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