Psychic Pizza - Manifest your meal.
A 2020 case study.
Introduction
We were tasked with creating a brand identity for a restaurant that reimagines and enriches the concept of dining at home in the midst of the COVID crisis.
Our design team consisted of four core members and a consultant, Paul Sheriff. Henry kept us on task as project manager, Ruifeng organized our process as production manager, Aidan consolidated our work and research as presenter, and Kaity brought new insight into the conceptual process.
The Problem
The COVID-19 epidemic introduced an unprecedented range of challenges to the restaurant industry, namely by shifting business from a wholly immersive dining-out experience to one that is exclusively takeout or delivery. Our main challenge was to create an engaging and inclusive in-home dining option while also countering the disconnected feeling of social distancing. We focused on a few key issues to solve this: boredom with traditional takeout and delivery options, analysis paralysis (an overwhelming amount of menu options), and making the experience of having to dine at home due to COVID overall more exciting.
Research / Our approach
We spent weeks researching and brainstorming names and concepts for various restaurants that adhered to our goals. Our ideas spanned a variety of food genres and approaches to socially distant dining. Then we reviewed each of the ideas and narrowed them down from 50 to 10 to 3 and finally to 1: Psychic Pizza.
Our research showed us that 25% of households will order out for pizza at least once a month. Ordering pizza is a quick and simple meal that allows for a variety of different combinations that almost anyone will enjoy.
Another thing that our research brought up is that this popularity of the pizza industry brought out another problem that we did not see at first. How can we create a pizza shop that still has the feel of a traditional pizzeria, while also giving it a personality that consumers have never seen before.
Psychic Pizza allowed us to brand a simple pizzeria into a new, more mystical and exciting experience. The unique theme brought creative and innovative elements into the design and deliverables for our restaurant, and reintroduced the magic of dining out at home.
This was also the perfect way to brand the solution to analysis paralysis. Customers unsure of what they wanted to order and faced with an overwhelming amount of options on the menu can skip the process of choosing for themselves, and instead place their trust in our restaurant’s “psychic abilities” to guess what they want for them. Customers typically decide on takeout when they do not want to cook for themselves or don’t have time. This simple feature takes about 5 minutes of your time. Another premise of our restaurant was that it would not only have a traditional menu to order from, but a mystery box feature that randomizes allows you to “manifest your meal,” and a psychic prediction feature that guesses what you want based on your previous interactions with the app. This adds an element of mystery and excitement to what would otherwise be a standard takeout order.
We believe anybody can enjoy pizza but we wanted to tailor our brands to specific demographics in order to develop tactical marketing strategies. Our target age range was 18–30, a mix of working class Millennials and Gen Z college students. Due to the pandemic forcing our relationship with the customer to be almost entirely digital it was important to target a customer base that could be reached through digital media and be more inclined to use delivery apps.
The site map was a necessity for breaking down exactly what we wanted in our apps. The apps wanted to give basic information about Psychic Pizza and also make the menu’s features quick and easy to use. We made it a point to keep it simple and flexible so each group member could use it as a foundation and have the capability to design it in any way that fit their own brand.
Individual Approaches
After we were set on the ideas we branched off to create visual collateral that would function as individual brands using all of the ideas we came up with as a team. We all started with mood boards and sketches for our logo design. After creating logo designs we started to create the brand collateral that would correspond with the our respective logos. The initial ideas and branding concepts such as the mystery box and psychic guessing feature came to life in four unique ways.
Aidan Cunningham
I based my ordering app off of the site map we created as a group. The main focus in my app is the menu. It only takes one tap to reach and all of the food is on one page utilizing three carousels divided by entrees, side items like desserts and drinks, and the psychic features as well as promotional stuff. This layout is intended to present everything in front of the user so they don’t have to look around for very long to find what they want. The video below is a more extensive walkthrough of the app.
Kaity O’Hanlon
Ruifeng Chen
Conclusion
Covid-19 put a restraint on the way brands could interact with the customer and how our team could interact with each other. We had to develop creative solutions as a group so we can build something we’re all proud of. We did that by defining key problems the pandemic instigated and developing a strategy utilizing each team members strengths to divide the workload into more manageable pieces. Along the way we challenged ourselves to strengthen certain skills and develop new ones in the effort of becoming more versatile designers. In the end, Psychic Pizza became something unique for each team member but the ideas we created together served as a foundation for our individual branding collateral and we continued to share feedback and ideas to improve our bodies of work.
Credits:
Project Manager: Henry Oatts
Production Manager: Ruifeng Chen
Presenter: Aidan Cunningham
Research / Creative Lead: Kaity O’Hanlon
Professor: Paul Sheriff
