Pitstop Lagos is Nigeria’s first cycling, fitness, and wellness-inspired restaurant. The go-to place for wellness-inspired professionals and hobbyists to relax, replenish, recharge and network. A one-stop hub for cyclists, runners, and enthusiasts of all sporting activities that promote wellness. The restaurant is a nexus of food and fitness.
CHALLENGE
In 2020, just a few months after the business kicked off, Covid hit, followed by a global lockdown and mel
In 2020, just a few months after the business kicked off in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center, the Covid19 pandemic hit, followed by a global lockdown of cities and a meltdown of the hospitality industry globally. The pandemic and lockdown had an unusual toll on the business, leading to its eventual shutdown in 2020.
With the gradual easing of the lockdown and some semblance of normalcy returning, the business owners began to think deeply and differently about how to approach the hospitality business in a post-covid world where our urban lifestyle was evolving rapidly, and fitness has become a central part of living in cities.
The restaurant was practically unknown at the time and playing in a city with fierce competition by hundreds of restaurants competing to attract new customers while also bringing back their old customers.
Arden & Newton was engaged to help define and clarify a winning brand strategy, Re-launch strategy, content, and marketing strategy to help achieve top-of-mind awareness within a short period of time.
PURPOSE AS STRATEGY
We started out by clarifying and defining the brand by using a unique strategy that transcended profit-making, we leveraged purpose as a strategy by bringing to the fore, a major challenge of living in urban cities, the problems of industrialization, its unhealthy toll on human lives and why this business is set up, not just as a restaurant but to support people to live healthy amidst our challenges. We designed a purpose that the target audience can easily connect to and serve as a bonding mechanism between them and the brand.
Our path to clarifying the brand and all of our activation activities were defined purely by insights from data, industry (hospitality data), industrialization and data on urbanization, surveys etc
Some may see it as a splash of genius, we think its about rightly connecting a higher purpose to your business as a strategy.
~ Perez Tigidam
THIS IS PITSTOP LAGOS
Brand-centric content design.
DESIGNING A MARKET-MOVING MARKETING CAMPAIGN.
Lagos being a very chaotic city has become the hub of fitness enthusiasts in Nigeria, with the popular Ikoyi bridge as the ground zero. We wanted to find a storytelling path to connect with this core demographic before spreading out to citywide food lovers for the restaurant.
We conducted a survey among 10,000 residents of Lagos, to find out their deepest motivations for their consistent fitness routine. Insights from the survey ranged from motivations such as fashion fitness (The highest percentage) to sexual enhancement, fitness for work, etc.
On the back of these insights, we developed a series of branded content marketing campaigns with the main theme being FIT FOR THE CITY with sub-themes such as:
Fit For Fashion (Film, Print & Digital campaigns)
Fit For Sex: (Film, Print & Digital campaigns)
Fit for Work
The campaign was executed across film, print, and social media campaigns and resonated deeply with the entire city and not just food lovers. It created ‘difference’ for the brand with a unique social media persona.
FIT FOR FASHION
December 2020, with most people craving to get out there post covid lockdown, we dropped the first of our film series which went viral almost immediately and helped the restaurant’s sales shoot through the roof, with instant brand recognition to date.
January 2021, knowing the holidays were over and it was time to return to work, we created print and social campaigns targeting the same fitness demographic who had dropped all caution for unhealthy eating during the holidays. Some had added excessive weight and gotten out of their preferred weight, this put the ads in context and made them very relevant to the target audience, causing the ads to trend across social media channels for days at length and winning multiple local and international awards.
HEALTHY EATING: INTRODUCING CALORIE COUNT TO NIGERIANS
Intentionality in product design and experience thinking was critical to success and new customer attraction/retention. We worked with the chef to design calorie-based meals that people can actually eat by the calories. Another first for the brand in Nigeria.
This aided some of our new creative campaigns.
MARKETING MEETS TECH
One of the most exciting components of our engagement on this project was our ability to use data, technology, and art and matched with the right timing of campaigns.
Background:
In January, we noticed that sales have dropped across all restaurants in the city as people returned to work and traveled back after the holidays. This presented us with a good opportunity to activate our FitForTheCity campaigns. But campaigns are not enough, we needed a way to track data around guests and also open a pipeline for the restaurant’s growing community.
Our agency built a custom discount generation platform that was connected to the campaign. Audiences who saw the campaign and were interested were further baited with a discount code. Guests go to the platform and generate a code unique to them and also unique to the particular visit and can be tracked. A database that sieves used codes and emailing system was also developed and integrated into the platform. This increased their sales by700%.
