Victoria Sushi — Hospitality

The brief

Victoria Sushi already had two stores in the Auckland CBD. The third, on 50 Albert Street, arrived with the problem every third store has. A new address is not a reason to turn up.

An opening needs something people want to see for themselves. A sushi counter opening in the CBD is not, on its own, that thing.

The Victoria Sushi sign above the counter at 50 Albert Street

We stopped selling the store and started building the reason.

Our approach

We went looking for a product that did not exist in this country. Push-up sushi, served in a tube you push up as you eat, was a format nobody in New Zealand had seen.

We sourced the packaging from a manufacturer in China and developed it into a menu item with the Victoria Sushi kitchen, timed to land on opening day.

The launch

Then we put it in the hands of the creators whose audiences would react to it first, timed to opening day.

The product did the work the address could not. It gave every creator in the campaign something to film that nobody in the country had filmed before, so they wanted to make it rather than just get paid for it.

Creators eating push-up sushi in store, from the launch campaign

The store film. Front door to the counter to the fryer.

Staff-led content shot at the front counter.

A year on

A launch is a moment. It takes the attention, and then the attention moves on. The stores still open the next morning.

So the campaign became a retainer. Twelve months later we are still running the account, shooting monthly across all three CBD stores, so the feed shows what is on the counter this week instead of what was there on opening day.

Strategy

A new address is not news. We went looking for something that was.

Product

Packaging sourced from a manufacturer in China, developed into a menu item with the kitchen.

Launch

Influencer campaign timed to opening day, built on a format New Zealand had never seen.

Retainer

Twelve months of monthly social across all three stores, and counting.