Pei Wei is a fast and casual Pan-Asian restaurant chain that combines traditional dishes with trailblazing recipes. We were challenged to combine their values into a successful marketing strategy that really brings the heat!
Pei Wei is a nationwide Pan-Asian fast dining experience with over 120 locations, where dishes are made to order in an open concept kitchen using cooking methods like wok firing. Through our relationship with Celebrity Chef and Pei Wei partner Jet Tila, we landed the opportunity to reinvent Pei Wei’s social media strategy and redesign their social media identity, which led to completely revising their digital presence. We planned and executed monthly restaurant photoshoots, and quarterly shoots with Jet Tila, managed community engagement, strategized marketing tactics for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter; organized and hosted influencer events, and created collabs for new dish launches. In just one year, we were able to grow Pei Wei’s Instagram following to over 16K followers, completely transform each platform’s content, and boost numbers across the board.
Pei Wei came to us trying to reach a more youthful and trendy audience while still maintaining their traditional asian american family values. We directed photoshoots, wrote engaging and funny copy and combined our ideas with their existing font and brand colors in new, edgy and trendy ways.
For Facebook, we discovered that this audience was a little bit older than the audiences of the other two platforms. They responded best to posts letting them know about promotions and new dish launches, giveaways, and posts featuring Jet Tila. They did not resonate as much with the memes or current social media trends.
On Twitter we really got to be creative and funny. We referenced current televisions shows and movies, celebrities and current events, and other trending topics, and made them relevant to Pei Wei in humorous and engaging ways while using trending hashtags to reach more people.
Our Instagram audience on the other hand, loved to see bold imagery, meme’s, plays on social media trends, Jet Tila posts, giveaways, and creativity.
Every month we would feature a flavor profile where we would break down the dish to show what delicious flavors and ingredients made up their dishes. This type of post helped us Showcase the unique flavor combinations in our dishes Added a visual edge to our work by actually breaking apart a dish
Big Hype Marketing took the restaurant's social media from looking like a common fast-food chain with little excitement and no social media strategy, to an innovative and trending brand that illustrated that it understands its customers’ sense of taste and humor. The integrated campaign helped lead to increased social media following and engagement, sales, and long-term brand loyalty through the form of the Rewards program.