Case Study 1: WAGAMAMA (Albert)

Brief

A few years ago, Wagamama made the decision to stop using discounts in marketing. They felt it was a good move overall, but it put them out of sorts with their student customers. Wagamama needed a new way to re-engage with students in the UK.

Approach

Wagamama tasked the insight-driven agency Albert with the brief of re-engaging students with the Wagamama brand. To do this Albert realised that social media is critical for students, but as a marketing tool it isn’t enough on its own. To reach this audience, Wagamama needed social media combined with live and promotional tactics-and this is where BAM came in.

By booking through BAM, Albert and Wagamama were able to centrally coordinate a UK wide student campaign, receiving in-depth market knowledge and a designated single point of contact. BAM also co-ordinated the campaign with the student organisations, ensuring that this fantastic campaign could reach as great an audience as possible.

Albert’s central idea was to send two carefully selected students on a road trip, serving noodles to the student nation. These students blogged about their trip to 12 universities, posting comments and photos, and inviting others to follow them and get involved. This became the Wagamama Noodle Tour.

Results

Currently longer term results are pending but during the 4 weeks post-activity, student custom in the target outlets rose by more than 80% and had over 30,000 active members on the Noodle Tour community and 800,000 views on the Facebook page.

Testimonial

Anonymous |Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:05 pm “This activity visited my university in Cardiff and I thought it was brilliant. There were gigantic queues for the tasters and their use of social network sites was very effective, regular status updates encouraging students to answer a question or undergo a ‘dare’ on the day in order to win a £20 voucher. There was a big buzz on campus about it all day - well done wagamama I say! Genius. Must have been high cost, but in my opinion worth it, by the end of that day everyone knew exactly who and what Wagamama’s was!”

Anonymous comment made on an article about Wagamama’s experiential campaign on Marketing Week, “Wagamama targets students with experiential campaign”.