THE CHALLENGE
When you are the nation’s leasing leader in retail and restaurant properties and a pandemic unexpectedly interrupts your operations throughout the USA, you have to get creative to support your tenants. That didn’t stop Regency Centers, however, from asking us for ideas on how they could help the locally-owned restaurants at Grand Ridge Plaza in Issaquah engage with customers as the threat of COVID continued to dragged into its second year. Regency Center’s needs were clear: independently create and execute a program with clear benefits to the restaurants and deliver an experience that would be memorable to participants. It was important that shoppers and businesses associated Grand Ridge Plaza with community benefit and pandemic relief.
OUR APPROACH
Grand Ridge Plaza’s fine dining choices: Agave, Bai Tong Thai, Chinoise, SIP Restaurant, and The Ram. Each restaurant represents a locally owned business and several of them share a high level of recognition from the Issaquah Highlands through the Puget Sound.
We start every job with a deep dive into researching our clients needs — in this instance, the restaurants we’ve been hired to support. Because when executing “big ideas” it’s imperative to “read the room” to insure the program will support partner expectations and deliver results.
Regency and Polite Society sketched out a few potential ideas and one of the concepts stood out: “Cooking with Chefs”. Yet, it wasn’t without its challenges!
“Cooking With Chefs” was a simple concept. Anyone who binged full seasons of Cooking with Selena Gomez or Nailed It in those early, stuck-at-home days of the pandemic, would get it. Who hasn’t dreamed of cooking alongside an on air host? With restaurant-goers and foodies hungry for engaging experiences and starved for interaction, we wanted to place the restaurants of Grand Ridge Plaza front and center.
We researched the restaurants at Grand Ridge and identified several that were perfect for our concept. Based on our communication with the restaurants, we understood they were short-handed and it was clear that the bulk of their income was generated between 6-8.
However we also learned they had their hands full trying to keep staff from quitting but also sell enough food to keep the doors open. After a few communications we learned they were not so keen on certain aspects of the activation idea. Namely, they did not want to coordinate, schedule, and host the virtual cooking classes themselves.
With neither the chefs nor the restaurant owners open to the idea of participating in a a virtual segment for invited contest winners during the dinner hour — was “Cooking With Chefs” dead in the water?
Not in the slightest. We contacted each of the restaurants and asked them to consider a different approach: Each chef would provide a signature recipe from their menu and teach us how to prepare it, while we videotaped them making it outside of business hours.
The Promotional Pathway Outlines the essential creative content that was created to support each of the five participating restaurants involved in “Cooking With Chefs”.
We would then edit this into a video for promotional purposes to get people to eat at the restaurants. People who participated during the promotion were entered to win the prize: an evening in the virtual kitchen for 3 households! If we agreed to host the virtual segment, perhaps this would bring the concept back to life with a little extra lifting on our end?
They agreed.
We would choose winners each week (one for each restaurant/recipe) to join us in preparing the dish and create a second video of this experience that the participating households would post, providing each restaurant additional content and exposure.
Over the course of the promotion, we provided top-to-bottom creative concept, development, execution, and post-event reporting. Rollout components include creative brief, restaurant outreach, chef consultations, marketing (including social media, hosted content, influencer campaign, paid content placement, e-news subscriber outreach, location signage, flyers, online advertising, mentions, and peer-to-peer placements), enter-to-win contest management, in-house content creation, video production& editing, and hosted weekly, live-stream cooking tutorials with three households per event over five weeks.
Overview of the marketing components that were activated to promote Cooking With Chefs to Eastside residents.
Retail Partnerships provided added benefits. Early on we realized that Home Goods and Safeway opened the door to additional cross promotional opportunities. Each of the participating house holds received a gift from Home Goods that tied into the recipe preparation and we would provide Safeway with a shopping list of ingredients for each household that was delivered to their home 24 hours prior to the start of TEST
Information packets for winners
We promoted “Cooking With Chefs” via a series of native content articles produced & promoted by Sound Publishing. Additionally, we worked with two local foodie influencers and relied heavily on social media (Instagram, Facebook) to promote the enter-to-win and to showcase 12 unique videos created during the promotion. The video content was designed to be “evergreen”, so all the videos are still featured on Vimeo and Youtube. Today, each of the videos remain in rotation on various social media channels — reaching new viewers who may have missed them when they originally debuted in early 2021.
Above: An example of one of the articles in a series produced and published online by Sound Publishing. Each article was highlighted on seven of Sound Publishing’s Eastside area website offerings and sent to the homes of email subscribers in Redmond, Kirkland, Bothell, Bellevue, Issaquah, Mercer Island, and the Valley.
Clockwise from top right: Instagram Post summary report, one of two Influencers on Instagram reports, a summary of Vimeo & Youtube content, and the Facebook Post summary report that highlights the top posts featured on the channel.
Winner testimonial
Digital Suite
OUTCOME
Based on the avalanche of survey responses following each of the TEST KITCHEN segments, the event offered a unique and memorable evening for all of the participants. In the midst of the pandemic, it was a godsend to have the opportunity to engage with new, friendly faces. It was very intimate experience that forged new friendships and created a long lasting connections with our featured restaurants.
The restaurants were thrilled for the exposure in a time of need, and the winners all agreed it was an experience they wanted to have again in the future. In the midst of a bleak time for restaurants and socializing, we were able to bring our concept to life and people together.
The winners in action
This video features live footage shot in Agave restaurant’s kitchen with animation. Together, the the video delivers a fun and festive opportunity to learn to cook a menu favorite of Pasillo & Coffee-braised short rib tacos, homemade tortillas, and salsa. Olé!
