Driving growth for Cote with a hyper local brand campaign

Côte Brasserie has been a staple of the UK high street dining scene for over 20 years and grew successfully to an estate of over 80 restaurants around the country with little marketing . However, the brand had become increasingly reliant on its core loyalists who tended to be retired couples.

To further compound the revenue challenges, competitor restaurant group The Ivy had expanded rapidly into Côte’s heartland territory with its Brasserie concept and was stealing share from Cote’s previously dependable loyalists.

Our strategy was to run a hyper local brand campaign around a suitable number of locations in a test-control approach. This would allow us to quantify the impact of brand advertising on brand metrics, online bookings, and ultimately restaurant covers (diners), and build the business case for continued advertising investment.

We used Cote’s CRM data to identify existing customers by location and demographic and leveraged third party market research to understand which segments to target and where the greatest threat to market share was coming from.

We ran the new campaign across VOD and Cinema. Cinemas were selected bespoke, based on our target locations while on VOD we used postcode data together with mosaic and interest targeting layers to reach the households most likely to be in our potential target segments.

We executed a hyper local ‘One Campaign’ blending Sky AdSmart with Sky VOD activity and targeted those in a ‘casual dining’ segment, leveraging Mastercard data to identify households that habitually dined in similar restaurants.

In digital display and audio we leveraged mobile location data for a competitor conquesting strategy, and targeted those people who had visited one or more of Cote’s competitor locations in the preceding 3 months.

Lastly in Social we created custom audiences based off Cote’s customer data and scaled them using lookalike technology, all with the same geo-fencing radius applied to avoid wastage.