Expanding with new restaurant locations during a global pandemic might seem like an unrealistic goal. But Little Caesars® is no ordinary pizza brand. And we weren’t about to give them just any old marketing plan, either.
Through a deep dive into the Little Caesars® franchise development business, and a test of 9 different creative executions, we were able to hone-in on messages that resonated with potential new franchisees. The result? Year-over-year growth of new openings in 2020.
After launching a program focused on supporting restaurant operators in the midst of COVID-19 challenges, Bush’s wanted to extend similar support to the K-12 food community. We began by recognizing that from serving onsite meals to preparing take-home meals for families, K-12 lunchrooms are busier than ever.
For ease and the chance to offer timely updates, we created a landing page complete with segment-specific recipes and downloadable resources including a promotional calendar and social media support. Additional communication came in the form of emails and Duke-inspired merchandising kits. Duke also inspired a student-focused website to help make time at home a little more fun, featuring kid-friendly recipes, bean facts and fun activities.
There’s no denying the adoration people have for Hidden Valley Ranch®. In fact, it’s more of an outright obsession. So, Ventura Foods wanted to leverage this cult-like following to show operators how much of a difference the #1 brand can make on their tables.
To adequately convey this tangy love affair, we decided to go with the universal symbol for hugs and kisses: XOXO. Through digital executions and a campaign landing page, we encouraged operators to make their already loved menu items even more loved with Hidden Valley Ranch®.
The demand for plant-based protein offerings is, well, growing. By leaps and bounds. And Tyson Foodservice has entered the category with the introduction of its Raised & Rooted™ line of plant-based nuggets, tenders and filets.
We created a multifaceted campaign to communicate the product’s amazingly delicious flavor and unlimited menu versatility. From a box mailer that captured the attention of operators, to table tents that appealed directly to hungry flexitarians, we helped nurture the introduction of the Raised & Rooted™ brand in the foodservice segment.
The new normal has shifted to-go in foodservice from being a maybe to an absolute must have. To help operators, we worked with Bush’s to create a takeout program that could help establishments keep families in their community well-fed and business going.
Starting with bean-based recipes for family-sized meals and original recipes created in tandem with chefs who had been furloughed due to COVID-19, we created an email campaign, landing page, point-of-sale materials, and social media tools to help operators in these unique and challenging times.
The Tyson Red Label® product line features value-added chicken offerings that save time and money for operators. Fully cooked grilled chicken filets and nuggets were already a hit, but some operators had a request: “can you make the grill marks even more pronounced?”
So Tyson Foodservice went to work in the kitchen, adding darker char marks on both sides of the chicken. Then we went to work as well, creating a hot sheet, rebate and digital ad executions that helped get the word out about the new hot-off-the-grill flavor and appeal.
People love burgers. But burgers have a bit of baggage. So, what do you do? If you’re Bush’s, you see an opportunity. Combine beans with beef (along with mushrooms and salt) to create a one-of-a-kind Blended Burger.
We worked with Bush’s to launch this savory concoction with a full campaign including print, digital, a unique landing page, product video, promotions, and more. Part beans, part beef, part creative, part great client, all awesome work to help foodservice operators tempt the growing hungry hordes of flexitarians with a flavorful and juicy burger that’s more healthful with less calories and fat than a typical burger.
Mel-Fry believes that great food comes from great kitchens. The back-of-house works hard on a daily basis, so a product like Mel-Fry can lighten the workload for foodservice operators and employees. By using a high-oleic soybean oil which lasts longer than standard commodity oils, Mel-Fry can also reduce oil and packaging waste up to 50%.
The rebrand included a digital ad campaign, email series, and a new landing page with a video explaining Mel-Fry and its reasons to buy. The split visual effect throughout the campaign demonstrates fry quality, consistency, and why everything is better when it’s Mel-Fry’d.
No, it’s not a glitch. It’s a 24/7 breakfast takeover. We worked with Tyson Foodservice to fill the social feeds with college students’ favorite breakfast moments. This campaign consisted of both Operator/Sales training components, and student-facing materials to encourage students to share how they do breakfast for a chance to win prizes. We provided universities with email assets, social media images and post samples to blast the breakfast momentum! As an added benefit, Tyson was able to gain helpful insights about how students are participating in the all-day-breakfast trend.
In a fight, who wins between bread and waffles? Waffles every time. The minds behind Runaway Grub knew this and developed an entire food truck menu around it. Featuring breakfast and chicken sammies all wrapped in waffles, along with some unusual crunchy, always-tasty toppings, Runaway Grub tempts and satiates hungry filler-uppers exclusively at Sunoco-branded and -partner gas stations. Marlin was enlisted to develop the branding, food truck graphics, and messaging for this concept built around unexpected, possibly impossible combinations.
Inspired by the one-of-kind flavor twists, the Runaway Grub logo takes an MC Escher-like turn. The surrounding typography is erratic and grungy, and the logo weaves into a winding backdrop creating an eye-catching visual that speaks to the creative culinary happening at this unexpected, yet downright delicious rolling restaurant.
Yakima Chief Hops spotted an opportunity in China’s burgeoning craft beer market to highlight hops as the foundation to great craft beer flavor. With the recent investment in China’s Boxing Cat Brew Pub chain, Anheuser-Busch was the perfect partner to help lead a grassroots effort for educating a culture that has only known watery lagers.
The initiative to highlight hops had several tactics working together with a strategy to educate waitstaff through online training and patrons through on-premise promotions, events, table games, and a Boxing Cat Brewery mobile app.
Converting customers from macros to craft starts by knowing what makes small batch craft beer better. Boxing Cat, China’s most celebrated craft brewery gets a user-authenticated online training portal built to train up the Boxing Cat staff to serve a better beer.
In support of a better trained staff and exceptional craft beer, the brew pub gets a rotating series of fight-like seasonal event and evergreen posters plastered from backwalls to bathrooms.
The Boxing Cat app engages customers at the restaurant and away with menuing from the tap to the kitchen, brew pub locations, LTOs, trivia contest giveaways, and a frequent drinker beer club.
In an effort to educate a new generation of Chinese beer lovers, in-booth games such as trivia and coaster hop factoids drive to discounts and giveaways.
We designed the Starbucks Branded Solutions (SBS) platform to combine several Starbucks sites into one cohesive branded experience. As a comprehensive online tool, segmented for each of the different SBS account types (there are 8, in case you were wondering), it provides Starbucks brand portfolio information, Starbucks associate and operator training, and an e-commerce shopping platform for each of the different types of accounts.
To help SBS operators transition to the new site, we created a clear and thorough how-to video.
We also developed a comprehensive style guide to ensure consistency in all seasonal and evergreen promotional opportunities that drive operator’s choices from inspiration to checkout.
To make this lovely site lovely across all devices, we developed flexible templating content through band stacking to make it seamlessly responsive.
Best of all, it’s worked. Really well. Starbucks has led the way in B2B e-commerce product fulfillment and continues to do so in a way that serves operators successfully for every sip and season.
As the leading brand of smoked sausage in the US, Hillshire Farm® is known for its distinctive flavor and long-standing tradition of quality meats.
To help them roll out a new line of bold, on-trend sausages, we created a campaign that let the ingredients do all the talking. Flavors were highlighted in a big way to show operators that these new products speak to customer cravings.
LAY’S® is one of the most loved potato chip brands in the world and their flavors can go well with just about everything, anytime. Sometimes operators just need a little tasty reminder of that.
The crispy, flavorful chips are the best selling tools, so we packaged up four of the most-loved flavors and sent sample boxes wrapped with eye-catching colors and imagery, along with information on the power of the brand as well as a valuable offer available only online.
Sure hash browns are a staple of modern breakfasts, but is that all they could be? Should all that flavor be as portable as it is delicious? Jimmy Dean® sure thought so. They wanted to take that hearty, warm, good-morning feeling you get from a great hash brown and let customers take it with them anytime, anywhere. And they asked us to help them communicate this new foodservice offering to their customers.
So, the ask was pretty simple: Develop a foodservice campaign to launch these tasty, on-the-go options in a way that lets operators see all the potential stuffed in every product. So that’s exactly what we did with table tents, sell sheets, posters—you name it. We stuffed everything we could into the campaign. Sorry, we had to.
Bush’s Best® mixed it up (literally & figuratively) by creating Classic Hummus Made Easy®—delicious hummus with traditional ingredients that only requires a quick trip to the blender and a can of garbanzo beans to complete.
To showcase the simple yet awesome nature of the hummus, all touchpoints communicated the superfast prep and astonishing flavor by keeping messages brief and the delicious possibilities front and center.
Between expanding government regulations, rising labor and food costs and always finicky students, school foodservice directors face a lot of challenges in the lunchroom. PepsiCo wanted to send a message that they get it—and can help.
If there’s one thing that keeps school foodservice directors motivated, it’s their passion for creating delicious meals that their kids will love. So we developed a brand campaign to let them know they have a partner in PepsiCo who shares their passion to please.
Miss Vickie’s® started in 1987 by a mother making kettle chips for her kids using ingredients fresh from the family farm. It’s a brand that truly started out of love and care and has grown into one of the most recognizable kettle chips in foodservice.
But the wonderful story and moral backbone of the brand was being forgotten. So, we worked with them (and the beautiful new packaging they’d just developed) to relaunch the Miss Vickie’s brand and remind everyone that the very best flavors are born from strong roots.
Everyone knows PepsiCo for its cola heritage, but there’s much more than soda going on behind the blue. There’s a massive portfolio of loved and leading brands, and even more than that, there’s a wealth of services and insights to help make sure that foodservice operators who work with PepsiCo can benefit from all that a global powerhouse has to offer. We developed a brand campaign and video to help audiences understand the many ways they can partner with PepsiCo Foodservice.
Designed by the PepsiCo Design & Innovation Studio, the PepsiCo Foodservice logo is the primary brand mark for their foodservice division. Marlin developed a comprehensive brand guidelines around the new identity that served as a wayfinder through the development of all internal and operator facing communications.
Named after a beach town in Australia and made on a farm in Colorado, noosa is a brand of super premium yoghurt (yep, with a fancy “h” and all). It gets its velvety smooth texture and ridiculously delicious flavor from 100% whole milk, a touch of honey and fresh fruit.
We were tasked to communicate all the adoration the brand already enjoys at retail to a new foodservice buyer. Our print and digital messages let operators know that this is no ordinary grab-n-go product—it’s grab-n-go-ohh!
High Liner Foods’ commitment to outstanding seafood stretches from sea to table to tomorrow. Whether its haddock from frigid Icelandic waters or salmon from the depths off the coast of Chile, their goal is to provide the very best while sustaining fish populations and environments for generations to come.
To share and celebrate their unwavering principles, we showcased the global waters and succulent products they’re proud to source from and serve. Through print, digital, promotions, and more, we let foodservice operators know that no matter where great seafood starts, it comes from High Liner Foods.
Nothing’s got more hot sauce cred than Frank’s RedHot® Sauce. It was the secret ingredient in the original Buffalo wings, and today it still puts up big numbers as the #1 hot sauce brand in America.
So the plan for a new site was clear: leverage the brand’s lead to help operators hone their own wing skills. The Frank’s RedHot® King of Wings program did just that—via promotions, recipes, tips, tools and a little old lady who brought her A game.
Holiday parties are known to bring out the personality in even the most humbug of guests. When you mix a little holiday spirit with some holiday spirits, fun and funny things tend to happen.
From Dashale to Hefevixen, Rydolph to Blitzner, this suds-in-cheek holiday site let visitors find the Reinbeer that most matched their holiday party persona.
Bush’s Beans are more than a good food, they’re straight-up super. They’re packed with nutrients, they can act as a meat alternative, they can work in almost any cuisine and across the menu, morning to midnight.
This campaign for Bush’s helped draw attention to all the incredible things their beans can do for foodservice operators. With a mix of digital and print media, sales collateral, and event marketing, word got out—Bush’s beans are undoubtedly the most super of super foods.
It all began when our team of chefs went into the kitchen to develop chili recipes using Bush’s Best® Baked Beans. The results were so delicious that we had to share their work with the world. Through various print executions and an online landing page, we made it clear there’s a whole new way to enjoy Bush’s Best® Baked Beans.
Breakfast is big. And it’s not just a morning thing anymore. With 3 top brands, The French’s Food Company wanted to share profitable ideas with operators. InspiredFlavor.com was born. This slick interactive tool is fully responsive across all devices and demonstrates the 24-hour-appeal of exciting new breakfast items offering full recipes and insightful videos. Stop by and prepare to look at breakfast in a whole new way.
We launched bushbeansfoodservice.com late in 2012. The site exudes the brand’s Can Do ethos by demonstrating the litany of possibilities and culinary solutions which only Bush’s Beans can bring to a foodservice operation. Phone? Tablet? Real computer? Go ahead and take the site for a spin.
Refreshing teas from a recently refreshed Tazo® tea brand were the focus for Starbucks spring promotion. To launch this promotion, we leveraged our deep knowledge of the customer base and digital behaviors to create a standalone program page that allowed operators to get inspired by Tazo® tea recipes, peruse and order products, even request marketing support.
CauseMomentum.org makes connections between people and partners of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. Fifty-one nonprofit partners, such as libraries, eco organizations, clinics, arts groups and more, showcase their charitable projects online and ask for donations, raising money as well as visibility of worthy causes throughout the community.
