Wagamama as a Team

Wagamama as a Team

 After much debating as a team we chose the Wagamama brief. Wagamama is Pan Asian inspired restaurant and their brief was to increase revenue in their restaurants via growth in eat out (Take-away) sales.

We first looked at what food that they were serving and who was their target market. With these questions answered it would help us define what it was that our take-away customers wanted.

We each contributed our ideas as a team and then chose the strongest idea. We decided that to get people to buy their take out service there had to be a free Wagamama gift. The gift wouldn’t be like a happy meal take-away. It would be  more of a upmarket version that fitted in with the target market criteria.

We looked at all different types of toys and concentrated on Asian style dolls. We thought about when would people be buying these take-outs? Is it going to be at lunch time or on their way home from work? Of the whole target market groups which ones  are  most likely to do this? What are the locations of all of the restaurants ? Are they always in the centres of a city? 

With all of these questions answered we decided that our main target market was business professionals, backpackers and students. This is because all of these groups live or work in the city centres and are more likely to use the take-away service at certain times like lunch or dinner.

 Our toy needed to appeal to an older and younger audience. We all so wanted to incorporate the Wagamama logo on the toy for marketing proposes and to reaffirm the Wagamana brand to our customers.

We thought about what business professionals, backpackers and students do. Business professionals and students have a desk and we wanted to come up with a toy that they would instantly put on their desks. The free gift would be Asian inspired dolls and each would have their own character/personality, which would make them more collectable.

We envisaged that the business professionals and students would collect these dolls and put them on their desks with the Wagamama logo and brand name on. Also on the back of the dolls would be the Wagamama telephone number so they could call and place their take-away order in the future. All of this would make them buy more take-away’s.

The backpackers would fit into the category of using the take-out service at certain times of the day like lunch and dinner. They wouldn’t necessarily put theWagamama toy on their desk, but we were sure they would be happy of a free toy.

As families don’t tend to live in the city centre of town they would use the take-out service less frequently than the other groups.

The product still had to appeal to backpackers and families even if they would be using the take-away service less. By doing so we have created these characters to fit into the existing Wagamama brand and their values. We have made the characters fun and each one has it’s own personality that people can relate too.

Our assumption was that from all our groups only certain ones who live close to town will use the take-away service more frequently because Wagamama don’t deliver. This meant that the free gift was designed to meet there needs mostly.

What’s great about the character’s is that they can be put into different types of media. There could be advertising banners on the Wagamama website or animation with the characters in. The characters could also be used in advertising campaigns.

I really enjoyed working in a group more than I thought I would. I really wasn’t happy with the final outcome of the look of the dolls as it wasn’t what I envisaged when I first came up with the idea. To me they look too western.  Mike suggested that they look generic because of the conflicts with some Asian countries, which we all agreed with.  So we didn’t want the dolls to look too Chinese or Japanese.

I just feel that the faces could have had an Asian feel to them and still have been generic.  With all this in mind that is way I chose to develop the Wagamama idea more myself.