Be an infinite player with Infinity: Our 2022–2023 work so far
Founding Infinity Agency
When the Infinity Agency joined forces back in 2022 as part of ADandPRLab at Panteion University, it was simply a mere common interest between five twenty-something year old undergraduate students. Combining our knowledge and shared background in communication, our team united to create Infinity, a Greece-based advertising and PR agency, creating media and specifically advertising & promotional content, following an infinite thinking mindset.
Our inspiration for our name and the general way we approach things lies within the words of the award winning author and speaker, Simon Sinek. In his book, the Infinite Game, he writes:
“Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be “better.” “Better” suggests a journey of constant improvement and makes us feel like we are being invited to contribute our talents and energies to make progress in that journey.”
As such, we strive for all our clients to become “infinite players” with our help — even our tagline includes the “infinite game” mindset; “be an infinite player”.
Every company is on the infinite journey of trying to reach for the stars and become better — that’s why our mission is to meet the needs and expectations of our future clients and their brands to the best of our ability, by designing high quality advertising content with our own unique flair and vision, as young people in the communication & media world. Additionally, we are also constantly developing and improving, and through our media channels we hope to showcase our progress as an agency, with the trial (and error) of a plethora of new, to us, media projects.
As such, Infinity hasn’t worked just as an advertising agency; as part of ADandPRLab, our team has played different roles and carried out a variety of projects where we have worked as marketers and advertisers, as mobile app creators, and as UX heuristics reviewers, amongst other roles. For the rest of this article, we’ll discuss the portfolio of some of the projects we worked on from December 2022 through January 2023, and the challenges and learning outcomes that came from each venture.
User Usability/UX Review & Heuristic Evaluation of Instagram
During December 2022, our team worked as UX heuristics reviewers, with a short UX review and heuristic evaluation we executed on the app of Instagram, to figure out possible issues and heuristic violations, based on the route a new Instagram user would take. In short, a heuristic evaluation is “a process where experts use rules of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and report issues”. In our review, this also included following Nielsen’s ten (10) usability heuristics for user interface design.
Taking into consideration Instagram’s scope and objectives, we created a proto-persona with specific tasks to do on the app — create an account, following and unfollowing users, and uploading posts and stories — simulating a new user’s experience on Instagram to provide us with insights and find current issues concerning Instagram’s UX design. To better recreate this experience, and to actually record the evaluation process, our team independently followed the steps of creating new Instagram accounts. We reported everything, issue or not, that occurred during the three different tasks, with our proto-persona in mind always, to avoid ignoring actions that might seem obvious to our team, as frequent Instagram users — and then came together to evalute all our observations and decided on the most important ones. The quality and quantity (or lack of) of the pages, status updates, prompts, visual design and mapping, and other things included in Instagram’s interface were the base of our evaluation.
Through this process, we concluded that Instagram as an app complies successfully with almost all of the 10 heuristics of Nielsen concerning UX design, depending on the task at hand. Its user interface is direct and simple, doesn’t require much cognitive effort, and it is user- focused above all. Despite that, a large platform with millions of users everyday like Instagram should try and minimize even these lesser issues occuring to new (and more experienced) users, which we found during our evaluation.
While our team didn’t face any serious challenges during this project, some notable issues arised while recording the issues, concerning some disappearing prompts/follow buttons, and also trying to understand how to correctly do the evaluation based on Nielsen’s heuristics, for which we were later informed that it wasn’t necessary to check the heuristics as a list — but rather take them into consideration during the evaluation process in general. Also, since each team member created their own new Instagram acccounts to record their personal observations for the evaluation process first, individually we not only experienced different problems but also evaluated their importance differently, which created small disagreements on what we believed was more imperative to include in the review.
What did we learn? Working as UX heuristics reviewers was something completely new for our team, but nevertheless it was an interesting experience of evaluating this popular social media platform, based on UX design elements that we wouldn’t really consider otherwise as social media users, or observe as individuals ourselves. Evidently, there are a lot of things that are considered when designing a user interface, and no part or issue is unimportant, more or less; everything can affect its usability, accessibility, and other aspects, which is something we learned through this project, and that experts need to take into consideration, which is why rules like Nielsen’s 10 heuristics exist.
Mobile quiz app/game prototypes
After the holidays, in January 2023, Infinity had the opportunity to again work on something unfamiliar to us, which required all of our team members to work as mobile app creators. More specifically, each member created individually their app prototype using Proto.io, in the style of a mini quiz that required at least three (3) questions minimum. To create our app prototypes, we followed the steps of creating a mobile app — analyze, design, implement, test, publish — on a much smaller and restricted scale.
All of us brainstormed to figure out the topic for our individual prototypes, and of course at least 3 questions concerning that, which required a short “analysis” to specify the other more technical requirements for the quizzes, like the user journey, and the possible actions and features of the app that would build it.
This brings us to the main part of this process, which was designing the prototypes — making each quiz interactive, visually and aesthetically appealing, that we visualized and brought to life through the Proto.io platform. Later on more assets were added, like icons, fonts, pictures, themes, music and sound effects amongst others to create a complete mockup. Of course, each team member executed further testing to find and fix bugs, inactive or faulty prompts, and add or remove features — ending up with a fully functional interactive prototype of a quiz game/app. Since these apps were essentially mockups, there was no need to do an actual distribution through app stores, but the quizzes are available on our site as part of our total work.
Working as mobile app creators, like the previous project, was a brand new experience for all of us, and we definitely faced some challenges working for the first time with Proto.io, especially when trying to figure out how all the tools and features worked and how to implement these to create our individual prototypes of a game and app mix. But with tutorials, trial and error, and creativity, each member created their own unique short quizzes in the form of a mobile app.
What did we learn? Because of the nature of this mobile app project(s), we can’t state that we have completely understood all parts of the process of being and working as a mobile app creator, but it definitely gave us some insights on specific sections of the mobile user interface design (UI) process, especially when it comes to brainstorming and prototyping an app, which can be useful in other fields as well.
COSTA COFFEE X INFINITY: A Marketing & Advertising Venture
Parallel to the previous projects, one of our more expansive and diverse projects during January 2023 was taking place, which was the INFINITY X COSTA COFFEE project, that included Market Research for the brand Costa Coffee in Greece, and a complete Advertising Proposal & Campaign for them — and similarly, we worked both as a marketing & an advertising agency, to discover, through primary & secondary research, Costa Coffee’s key challenges in the Greek coffee market, and create a complete campaign concept for the brand, called “It’s the small things!”.
Who is Costa Coffee? (Brief)
Founded in 1971 in London by Sergio Costa, Costa Coffee is now the second largest coffeehouse chain in the world, and the largest in the UK, and was sold in 2019 to The Coca-Cola Company. Currently, the brand in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which includes Greece, is following the steps of their usual actions worldwide, by developing as a total brand that offers at home products, away from home, Costa Coffee shops, products for professional use for Ho.Re.Ca serving Costa Coffee, and even offers their products at offices and airports through vending machines in specific countries.
The brand’s key message overall is optimism; By focusing on the small, yet positive impact of coffee, the brand presents that a cup of Costa Coffee can indeed make a tiny difference. Their communication role is therefore to gently nudge people to always see the greatness in even the smallest of things.
As described by the initial brief that the team was provided with, Costa Coffee’s main challenges in the CEE are low brand awareness and low brand trial. The brand describes their need to grow their prompted awareness and consideration, as across all markets, these qualities for Costa Coffee are far below the best performing competitor brand. Similarly, it’s mostly an explorer “at home” coffee brand, and in many markets, especially in CEE, they don’t have a coffee shop presence, which explains the lower levels of brand awareness in comparison with competitors — since a lot of people simply have yet to hear of and try Costa Coffee, or are buying it more seldom in comparison with the competition.
Infinity’s Marketing Research
Taking all this information about Costa Coffee into consideration, our team was required to build upon the current research and administer our own, focusing on the brand opinion in the Greek coffee market. First, we conducted a short consumer research to reveal the brand’s key challenge(s) currently in the Greek coffee market. For quantitative and qualitative research respectively, we conducted a short online survey on Google Forms (N=66), and then 6 separate interviews with Greek young adults, all of which ran from December 20th, 2022 till December 28th, 2022, focused on Greek young adults’ coffee preferences & opinions on Costa Coffee.
After collecting and analyzing all the results in detail, the main insights were as follows:
- The majority of participants were from Generation Z — almost 70% — and as such about 66% of those confirmed that they were university/college students.
- All participants almost equally drink coffee both at home (70%) & Ho.Re.Ca. (65%) daily
- About 2 in 3 have heard of the brand Costa Coffee, but 40% have yet to try it — mostly because they either haven’t come across the brand in stores or outside, and/or it hasn’t drawn their attention.
- When asked what would encourage them to try the brand, they confirmed that they would be interested in more advertising activations and store availability (retail & and mostly Ho.Re.Ca.).
- Interestingly, from the participants who have tried Costa Coffee before, the majority (almost 80%) said that they’d buy from the brand again.
From the primary research, two main problems were identified, which are low awareness and mainly low trial, overlapping our results with Costa Coffee’s research on their performance in the CEE coffee market.
Further secondary research focused on the brand’s competition in the Greek coffee market, resulting in finding that NESCAFE, Loumidis Papagalos, and Illy hold large parts of this market. In the following table we created a ranking based on brand awareness/popularity and the type of experience they offer — leaving Costa Coffee as the least familiar brand compared to its competitors. But what’s interesting is that in the SWOT analysis, it was deduced that Costa Coffee has opportunities to increase its promotion in Greece to a younger part of its audience, as well as to further cooperate with Greek Ho.Re.Ca. to serve their products.
Concerning the marketing mix (4Ps), what was really important to us in this analysis was the “promotion” factor, because, although the brand uses a diverse communication strategy, it’s currently a bit inconsistent — that’s why for this instance, our team decided on maintaining the current Costa Coffee strategy, with slight exceptions and differences to keep up with the conclusions of our research.
“It’s the small things!” — Advertising Proposals & Campaign Plan
Now fully working as an advertising agency, Infinity conceptualized a semiannual campaign consisting of a variety of activations based on Costa Coffee’s current communication strategy in Greece, called “It’s the small things!”, communicating an optimistic message to Greek coffee consumers — to “See the greatness in the small things”, with a cup of Costa Coffee. More specifically, this campaign focuses on a younger part of the brand’s audience, targeting Gen Z and Millennial (18–35 years old) university/college students, part of Costa Coffee’s general “Upgraders” target group, and an audience based on the results of our primary research.
Costa Coffee’s manifesto is all about perspective and optimism. By seeing the cup of coffee half full everyday, you can set your mind to a more optimistic outlook, which is necessary in times of stress and turmoil. To maintain and enhance Costa Coffee’s main value of optimism, this campaign focuses on this young adult audience who struggle with staying motivated as they’re stressed with keeping a school-work-life balance, and hopes to encourage them to see the greatness in the small things — with a cup of Costa Coffee. Through all kinds of promotional material, it aims to build brand awareness in Greece not just as an “at home” trial product, but as a secure, good quality choice for young coffee consumers and Ho.Re.Ca. businesses.
The executional advertising ideas, as part of a series of promotions for the campaign, include ATL marketing with multiple TV advertisements with inspirational stories from the target group, BTL marketing including merchandising (Costa Coffee Motivational Lid & Cups), pop-up retail (promotional Costa Coffee vans), and web and content creation, with the creation of an online map for locating the vans and Greek Ho.Re.Ca. businesses that offer Costa Coffee in Athens and Thessaloniki. Focusing on three (3) specific social media channels — Instagram, Facebook and Youtube — in combination with sponsorships with Greek influencers, the campaign’s social media advertising would be adapted through motivational messages, crossposting the TV advertisements and promoting the ATL & BTL activations, characterized by a motivational, relatable, and lively tone of voice. Similarly, the digital advertising actions follow trends and aspects that would appeal to the target group, with a variety of interactive actions (as seen below).
Working on such a multi-faceted project was no small feat, and our team definitely hit some bumps in the road. Our secondary research struggled from a significant lack of data on Costa Coffee’s current performance in the Greek coffee market, which we were able to manage by working with the specific sources we did find, in combination with various information about Costa Coffee in general, articles on the brand and its activations currently in Greece, and of course with insights from our primary research. Deciding whether to keep or create a new communication strategy was also challenging because of the variety of results we ended up with, but we finally agreed to a balance of conservation and differentiation to properly reflect both our research’s results and the needs and general image of Costa Coffee. Additionally, the process of creating a well-rounded campaign, that involved using the current communication strategy, brainstorming and deciding upon the best ideas to create a solid campaign, was a demanding process, since we had to strike a fine balance in our choices between creativity, fun concepts and actions that draw the target group’s attention, and intention, to reach the goals of Costa Coffee to expand their brand awareness in Greece — on which we all had different opinions for the most part, and at the end perhaps explains the directness of our executional advertising ideas.
So, what did we learn? While the INFINITY X COSTA COFFEE project was as of yet our most challenging endeavor as an advertising agency, it taught us the importance of considering deeply every executional aspect of a project at each step, and not working on each part as a standalone action. All parts of the marketing research flow into all the creeks and crevices of the advertising activations, and when managing an advertising venture like this one, it’s vital to take all data into consideration and suggest original but intentional concepts and solutions that in one way or the other, respond to the current issues and needs of a brand, and create a complete project.
Moving forwards as Infinity
Infinity remains a student-led agency in between a large and constantly expanding field of media and advertising, especially concerning online and digital spaces. Our team has faced many challenges, that we revealed during the showcase of our current portfolio, and we have much more to learn if we want to become a full-fledged advertising & PR agency. But we are of the opinion that the variety of projects we have undertaken, our willingness to try new things — without perfection being a given — and our self-awareness, are immensely important to developing and progressing as students, as an agency, and of course, as infinite players.
Find Infinity on:
Our website: http://infinityagency.tilda.ws/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infinityadagency/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/infinityadvagency
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@infinity_agency?_t=8XFHK2aWL93&_r=1
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/infinity-agency-61b266256/?original_referer=
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