cASE STUDY: CiciS

How helping Cici's Pizza reaffirm its core values sparked a relationship that ultimately led to brand transformation.

(Developed with BLITZ Agency)

BACKGROUND

As new leadership took the reins, QSR brand CiCi's Pizza found itself facing stagnating sales and a decline in customer satisfaction that was having a dispiriting effect on franchisees. The brand sought to reverse the tide, but was constrained by a longtime focus on pricing-centric communications that was yielding diminishing returns.

Enter BLITZ.

At the time, the BLITZ/CiCi's relationship was still in its infancy, but the agency was given an opportunity to present a smattering of digital work at the company's annual national franchisees meeting. Instead, we kicked the door open. Although admittedly beyond the scope of our remit, we maintained that reiterating the same old value messaging would keep the brand stuck in a spiral until we reaffirmed that other meaning of "value" -- the ones CiCi's stands for.  The turnaround started there.

I. THE MANIFESTO

Working closely with the team, I developed the platform "Celebrate Everyday", which would be presented as the overarching framework to guide all our creative. We quickly put together a video to illustrate the idea. We weren't expecting it to become the talk of the conference, but it tapped into the sense of purpose that franchisees had been thirsting for. In short order, we had not only won all the client's digital work, we also unseated the much larger, multinational incumbent AOR and soon CiCi's became one of the first full-service accounts in BLITZ's history.

II. DIGITAL: the PUSH BEYOND PIZZA

Fast forward a year or two. In the interim, BLITZ had helped revitalize CiCi's Pizza by orchestrating a product improvement campaign across a variety of broadcast and digital channels. CiCi's set its sights on a further evolution away from its pizza-centric QSR roots towards a more wide-ranging Fast Casual dining experience. It rebranded, dropping the "pizza" (and the apostrophe) from its name, introducing a new logo whose allusion to pizza was more abstract, and introducing a new campaign: "Beyond Pizza." 

The new-look, new-named Cicis would debut online via a revamped web and mobile presence, and I returned to the account to craft much of the messaging around this transition.

III. SOCIAL AND PAID MEDIA

As mentioned above, the bridge between "Celebrate Everyday" and "Beyond Pizza" was a product improvement campaign, also developed by BLITZ, entitled "Better. Believe it." While working on other accounts, I frequently lent support on this campaign as well, crafting copy as needed across a variety of touch points.