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As wagamama’s global digital agency, Wickedweb collaborated on the launch of the ‘art and eat’ campaign - an innovative platform to engage wagamama customers with the UK’s up and coming art and design talent.   

wagamama were looking to roll out a national marketing and PR campaign that would achieve a number of key objectives.  At the core, wagamama’s underlying objective was to engage, excite and provide an experience for customers – whilst re-inforcing wagamama as a 'cool’ lifestyle brand among its target markets.

In addition to creating regional brand awareness and building product awareness, robust marketing objectives are in place.  The campaign needed to drive awareness, excite its audience and encourage participation.  

Wickedweb focused on achieving these KPI’s by putting brand engagement at the heart of our digital strategy.  Our strategy around the campaign’s digital execution worked to extend the in-store experiential element by driving diners online to join the ‘art and eat’ debate.  This interactive platform supported brand engagement by providing a focus for dining conversation, and looked to prompt subsequent action from them by way of competition entries and re-tweets.

Our strategy was honed by an appreciation of wagamama’s key target audiences, as this ensured we could recommend solutions for engagement across a range of diners.

Ten national wagamama locations were chosen and one regional ’up and coming’ artist was selected per restaurant to feature their work. Wagamama worked closely with the prolific Moniker projects to source the artists. 

Wickedweb worked hard to unite the campaign messaging with digital technology, in order to evolve traditional marketing methods into an integrated 360 communications mix – positioning digital at the heart. Early results indicate our carefully considered strategy engaged the target audience and demonstrated real cut through.  Wickedweb feel the work showcased is innovative and engaging, supporting the key KPI’s. The wagamama brand has been elevated as a result, and the digital strategy seeks to rejuvenate an offline campaign into the digital sphere to maximise the longevity and awareness of the campaign / brand.

Find out what we did and read the case study here.

Wickedweb is delighted to announce wagamama’s recent appointment as their full service digital marketing agency. Appointed after an 8-month competitive procurement process which saw 10 agencies shortlisted to 3 for the pitch presentation, Wickedweb is excited to say that work is already underway on the strategy to better engage the target audience online. 

wagamama is an award winning Japanese inspired global restaurant chain, targeting a wide range of audiences. The brand is in a strong position in the pan-Asian cuisine market, which is expected to demonstrate recovery and growth in 2012 / 2013, meaning our plans for the future will engage users just as restaurant dining expenditure returns.  Our ideas are innovative and ambitious, whilst looking to capture the brand’s Japanese influence and minimalist style, so that wagamama is positioned as the industry benchmark.

Stuart Wells, Managing Director at Wickedweb comments:

“We are absolutely thrilled to be working with the wagamama brand and team on their digital marketing.  It’s an account we really wanted to win, as the business and relationship values strongly mirrored our own, which we know leads to the best results.  We have some really ground breaking ideas that will help bring all the wagamama digital channels together, and in turn  position the brand as one at the forefront of digital within their industry sector”.

Brand engagement is everything to wagamama which resonates perfectly with us – as an agency it is at the heart of everything we do and we look forward to enhancing the digital landscape for this fantastic brand.

Ingrid Williamson – Director of Marketing at wagamama comments:

“Finding the right agency can be a challenge. You want to work with people who understand your Brand and simply ‘get it’. Wickedweb got it right from the start. We are thrilled to have appointed Wickedweb and look forward to some very exciting times ahead”. 

Wickedweb are well placed to deliver an effective digital solution.  We are drawing on robust experience in the food and drink industry with clients such as Ella’s Kitchen, and in addition can utilise our online brand engagement strategies as showcased by clients such as Gear4, Cosmetics a la Carte and The Lifehouse.  This is an exciting relationship and we look forward to engaging the wagamama audience and delivering a real brand experie

A few of us here at Wickedweb made a beeline for the Figaro Social Media conference last week. We are glad we did – there was a fantastic line up of speakers and some real insight from brands such as the BBC, You Tube, O2, Kodak and Phones 4 U. Social media is ever-evolving, and Wickedweb were keen to discover how these brands are utilising social media – and more importantly what results are being harvested. 

What was clear from the conference is that social media strategy is driven by what we know about the customer / prospect. It is very CRM dependant, and insight is best gained by what O2 calls ‘the continual conversation’. Regular tweets from a brand are essential and much more effective in building loyalty and confidence than ad-hoc spikes of communication. O2 have a team to manage this continuous conversation with their customers, and find it gives them competitive advantage.

At the core of this is the notion that social media is all about engagement. YouTube makes an interesting point: social media is a fantastic platform for building sparks of excitement for a brand, which ultimately creates and maintains this engagement. Video is ideal for this, especially if the Facebook icon is added to the video so that this excitement can be shared.

However, the question on the audience’s lips of course is how do we actually measure engagement via social media? We came to the conclusion that KPI’s could include areas such as likes, a change in attitudes, mentions on Google, awareness, continued advocates and bloggers etc. Xbox added to this by talking about ‘media stacking’: using various social media channels for better cut through and amplification of your message – and Britmums endorsed this by saying that brands should utilise a good variety of social media channels to satisfy different consumption habits. It is good practice to establish your voice on different channels and be proactive, so that as a brand you are ready when a consumer comes searching for you in their preferred way.

But it’s not all about the number of ‘likes’ a brand has. It is far more effective to look beyond the volume and think about what you actually want to do with them. O2 were keen to impart that it is essential that a brand focuses on exactly what they would like social media to achieve at the outset. Phones 4 U look at the actual cost of a ‘like’ which is interesting and also look to put a value of the ‘like’ to the business.

Brands can only do so much – although there will be more success capitalising on social media if brands can focus and build on social equity. This is about friends looking out for each other and sharing, rather than putting the actual brand first. There is definitely the feeling that a consumer would like their voice to be heard now that they have been given a platform - and brand love is there for the taking if a company can show they will listen.

In conclusion, social media as a platform gives brands an opportunity to reveal and re-iterate different aspects of their personality. O2 suggested that companies “dip their toe in and try”, with an emphasis on managing any consumer issues as quickly as possible. 

For me the sentiment of the day came from Kodak – this brand revealed the key to their social media success is to “engage, educate, excite and evangelise”...

Social media is a once in a lifetime, global phenomenon and we live and breathe it here at Wickedweb. We love delivering impactful social media solutions - our strategists are always looking at fresh angles to amplify the voice of our clients so they can engage further with their customers.

We're often asked for tips on how to kick start a social media strategy so I thought I would post this blog. For those of you who are new to social media and managing it in-house, I have come across a great article by the CIPR that summarises the do's and don’ts quite nicely. I hope you find this useful...

http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/04/12/pr-body-cipr-publishes-10-dos-and-donts-of-social-media/

Google’s new ‘+1’ feature is the latest attempt at making search more social.  The basic idea is very similar to the Facebook ‘like’ button – when you like something, in this case a search result; you click the Google +1 button.  This is then visible to all your friends connected to you via your Google account. The benefit comes when you are searching for let’s say a new camera; you go to Google, type ‘digital cameras’ and click search.  As you are scrolling through the results you notice the +1 button next to dpreview.com because, for example, your photographer friend +1’d it previously.

Apart from the obvious benefit of having users +1 your site, if +1 catches on it would be inevitable that Google would include +1 as a ranking factor, however the question is if it catches on.

In essence I think +1 could be a really useful feature, when I am researching a product or looking for information on a particular subject it would be great to see what my friends recommend.  But my friends are not in the mindset for promoting, removing, starring or +1ing results when using Google – they just want to get to where they are going.  This has been the critical flaw in all the Google voting / result editing offerings, people don’t want to edit results, they want Google to do that for them.

Google have a shocking history when it comes to social search, remember Buzz and Wave? No? Well not surprising considering their short and uneventful lives.  We also had SearchWiki which allowed us to promote, comment on and remove results, there was also SideWiki and then stars in search for marking your favourite results – all of which have flopped.

So will Google +1 succeed and become a part of how we search?  In short, I don’t think so.  Google should stick to what it does best, providing unrivalled web search - sharing, bookmarking, voting and social features are best left to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and the like.

For those of you involved in e-commerce, here is an interesting idea for your Facebook strategy.  Whilst there is no denying that Facebook has its place in engaging users and sharing content, this article comes from a different angle and explains that Facebook needs to be much more hard hitting.

Research shows that it’s all about the deals...read more.

Source – statistics from eConsultancy

Our clients regularly ask us 'what is the point of social media?', or tell us 'we won't use Twitter we don't see the point.' ...

It's not all about just Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. There's a whole host of conversation taking place across the world which the image below illustrates. The key element is to grasp and understand where you audience is, and what they are saying about a brand and it's products.

Open your mind to the Conversation Prism ...