OVERVIEW
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Restaurants you love, delivered to your door.
Launched in September 2015, Amazon Restaurants offers food from favorite local and national-brand restaurants to Prime members across the U.S. and in London. Customers can browse a selection of top-rated restaurants in their city, place orders with their Amazon account at Amazon.com, PrimeNow.com, or on the Amazon and Prime Now mobile apps, then track the status of their delivery in real-time.
ROLE
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Lead Visual Designer
Collaborated with product, sales, account management, and marketing to create awareness of Amazon Restaurants and to drive both acquisition, engagement, and brand loyalty. Concepted, designed, and produced brand-consistent marketing content across website, mobile app, email, direct mail, promotional assets, social media, and sales collateral.
JULY 2016 - NOVEMBER 2016
CHALLENGE
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Having launched on Prime Now and seeing the user base grow rapidly while anticipating the expansion into new markets, launching on Amazon was an obvious next step. The assumption was simple, millions of customers visit Amazon everyday and restaurant delivery is another great service to add value to a Prime membership. Amazon Restaurants was the next to be added to a portfolio of brands/services already heavily saturated by the Amazon title. Not having an existing identity the team performed several branding exercises. As a lean team they knew a full branded package was going to be a stretch but if they were going to do it, now was the time.
AURORA
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If you have never studied the meanings of color as it pertains to marketing and branding, it is well-worth taking some time to understand how color contributes to your overall brand in the minds of your target audience. The brand color “Aurora” was chosen from an extensive ui color palette being developed by a larger UX org, in efforts to create and test a more engaging shopping experience. This early design decision would have a major impact across deliverables, one that I was now responsible to create and reconcile.
My first reaction to this color was at best, confusion.
I was stuck inside a color theory (assumption) bubble, and I needed to get out. Just like our product, I started revising, testing and evolving the components of our visual identity. Color is a powerful way to build brand recognition and visually communicate brand values. Its importance and influence on our branding development was the key to making a strong and consistent identity. The success of the brand had nothing to do with how I felt, but everything to do with if and how the product will be used. Marketing defines the brand and product brings the brand to life by building a great product.
Aurora became one of the single most important components of our identity across all deliverables.
DIRECT MAIL
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In an effort to improve conversion/adoption rate an average of 500 - 800K direct mailers are sent out nationwide every month. Direct mailers provided customers within a metro launch area, or extension of a metro area, $10 off their first order with Amazon Restaurants. We often ran (tested) cross promotional promos as well with other Amazon services. Interestingly enough, Prime Video customers LOVED when we did this.
EMAIL
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A lot has changed since the first email was sent in 1972, and email marketing has changed right along with it. Consider for one minute how just a few years ago it was considered revolutionary that most people access their inbox from their pocket.
Our marketing and content team was hard at work drafting and creating new and relevant emails, aiming to improve our customer acquisition and retention. One of the most sought after and highly requested design requests was to build out a branded repository of email graphics. Amazon Restaurants email marketing played a pretty big role in creating a sustainable, inbound playbook for closing and delighting our leads and customers.
CHICAGO SUBWAY ADS
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In October 2016 Amazon Restaurants ran an out of home subway awareness campaign on 12 exclusive advertiser trains with a total of 350 interior ads. The ads were launched on the two most popular train routes in Chicago–brown and red line–with an average daily ridership of 290k. By the way, Fran is a marketing specialist who writes and edits a variety of the Restaurant's content.
AMAZON RESTAURANTS CELEBRATES ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY
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In September 2016 Amazon Restaurants launched their first multi-channel, integrated campaign designed to engage and offer both new and existing customers a limited time, exclusive offer. To celebrate Amazon Restaurants’ first birthday customers were offered not one, but two $12 off promo credits.
Fun fact, when the team was trying to land on the birthday promo amount we had a meeting about a meeting in which we prepped for a stakeholder meeting. After presenting what the team felt was a great offer, our director look at us, [deadpan face] "why not make it a dollar off for every month we've been serving our customers". Then we doubled down (pun intended) on the $12 off promo campaign.
IN RETROSPECT
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Some key take-aways are:
Don’t read too much into the meaning of colors.
It’s less a science and an art than it is a strategy. If you go by the book of colors, you will never stand out from your direct competitors as they read that very same book. Yes, colors matter, especially when you use them to stand out but more importantly our brand’s personality and positioning became Aurora.
Design process
I quickly understood that every project was different and it was important to adapt my creative process appropriately. This allowed me to accommodate for tight deadlines and moving targets.
Working with copywriters
A successful marriage of effective copy and creatively innovative design will always require collaboration, flexibility, and innate understanding of your partner’s role. Quick iterations where copy and design react to each other shortens cycles, feedback lessens, and a unified result is achieved.
