Result: Less than a year since it opened, Bocktown Beer and Grill has become a favorite watering hole in its Pittsburgh neighborhood. It has won high praise from reviewers, has become one of the most talked about restaurants in the area, and was awarded a 2007 Readers Choice Gold Winner by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The client’s need: Bocktown Beer and Grill was the brainchild of Chris Dilla. She had long dreamed of creating a place where people could enjoy both high-quality beer and outstanding food – something she had constantly searched for but had never found.
Chris believed in the strength of her concept, but she knew that if she was going to compete in Pittsburgh’s highly competitive pub marketplace, she would need a smart promotion strategy from the start.
How we did it: Our first step was to take the ideas that had been in Chris’s brain for so many years and translate them into a well-orchestrated brand. With her concept as our driving force, we created a Brand Framework that clearly defined what Bocktown needed to be: the authority on beer.
Once Point of Vision had helped Chris pinpoint the essence of her brand’s definition, we were ready to tackle the restaurant’s visual identity. In one of his first assignments for our studio, creative director Holger Kappenstein showed why he’s so respected for his artistry. Hailing from Germany, Holger knew of a German tradition in which a brewmeister hammers a spout into a wooden keg, releasing the flowing beer into the waiting mugs of the surrounding crowd. This idea became the concept for Bocktown Beer and Grill’s logo. Designer Dain Johnson then took Holger’s inspiration a step further, etching Holger’s logo design into a block of wood and reproducing it as a woodcut print. The result is a logo with a traditional, old-world look, a perfect reflection of the handcrafted quality of the fine beers the restaurant serves.
While our creative team incorporated the Bocktown identity into designs for signs, menus, collateral, a Web site and more, we put our marketing minds to work and came up with a whole range of grassroots promotions for the grand opening period and beyond. Chris had been leaning heavily towards paid advertising, but we showed her how she could use blogs, the media, giveaways and special events to generate the same word-of-mouth for much less money.
Because Chris took the time to define the Bocktown brand in the early stages, she was able to ensure that everything in the restaurant is in harmony with the brand, from the table tents to the way the servers talk about the daily specials. As a result, she’s created an environment that’s luring in new customers, who become loyal patrons, who introduce more new customers, who become loyal patrons....
In the client's words: "The entire team at Point of Vision works from the core belief of the Brand Framework. They taught me so much about the brand being more than a mark. Their coaching has enabled me to live and breathe this brand as we have developed nearly every aspect of Bocktown Beer and Grill. Our brand speaks loudly to our clients, our employees and our vendors. When folks walk in the door of our restaurant, they just get it."
