The Brief
Rumour Mill were appointed by Pizza Punks to launch their first restaurant outside of Scotland. The brand had purchased a prime site in Belfast’s bustling Cathedral Quarter and wanted to make a lot of noise ahead of their official opening.
‘Anarchy in the oven’ is the ethos of the brand and they wanted this to be brought to life through creative and disruptive marketing techniques.
Our Approach
We created four main avenues of the brand to promote and utilised influencer relations to translate this message. The ‘Punk Pack’ consisted of four influencers who each reflected the four chosen angles.
The Party Punk who focused on the restaurant as a place to celebrate, enjoy cocktails and socialise with friends. The Vegan Punk who emphasised the restaurants wide selection of vegan friendly options on the menu. The Fashion Punk who represented the restaurant as a trendy location to be seen, gather content and enjoy. Finally, the Maverick Punk embodied all of the aspects of the brand and was the human embodiment of Pizza Punks.
These four influencers collaborated with the brand through a variety of methods. Behind the scenes imagery, teasers on the menu and engaging competitions ensured they were regularly mentioning the brand on their social accounts.
We partnered with graffiti artist Visual Waste to create an anarchy trail around the city centre of Belfast. The Pizza Punks, ‘Anarchy in the Oven’ symbol appeared at locations around the city. We utilised the influencers to provide their followers with clues on the locations of these symbols with incentives to win prizes. To coincide with this activity, we also partnered with Ulster University to launch a competition to find a local designer to create designs for the Pizza Punks boxes. First year Fine Art students were tasked with submitting their creative designs for the restaurant with the winner having their work proudly displayed as well as other exclusive prizes. The influencers worked with Pizza Punks to promote the entries and create a voting system to help whittle down the most popular entries and ultimately chose the winning design.
To conclude the influencer activity, we invited the punk pack to play an important role at the VIP launch event. The four punks helped to host the evening, directing other influencers to the photo areas, activities and providing advice on key activations and hashtags to utilise. Our influencer event involved cocktail making classes, pizza creation, Q&As with the team and an ‘Insta area’ to gather innovative content.
The Outcomes
Having created the Pizza Punks Instagram and Facebook page at the end of March 2018, we achieved 4,000 followers on Instagram and 3,700 likes on Facebook by the launch on April 12th. In just three weeks we utilised social media marketing combined with strategic influencer marketing to grow the page following. During the VIP influencer event we had a combined social reach of over 2 million impressions.
By May 2018 the Pizza Punks Belfast Facebook page had achieved 9k likes, surpassing the Pizza Punks Glasgow Facebook page which had been in operation since 2016 (managed by a Scottish agency).