The following is a marketing plan/case study that was really the brunt of my internship work over the summer of 2012.  This was for the Bloomington Independent Restaurants Association.  The text that's in between the slides will somewhat be the "director's commentary" to the rest of it.

Steve was directed to me by the general manager of Eagle Pointe Golf Resort, who I was also interning for at the time.  BIRA was nothing new to the local community and their facebook page was mainly shared statuses from other restaurants in BIRA.  Steve and I met over a cup of coffee where he pitched me the idea that he wanted something to do with his sculpture of the BIRA logo (in the right-hand corner of the slides) and make some sort of contest that involved it and the restaurants in BIRA.  From there, it was up to me.

USA Today was visiting in three weeks after our meeting, so I had to come up with something quick.  We ended up choosing to go with a contest that would test the knowledge of local eaters and get them to visit our Facebook and participate.  We also wanted to hype it before BIRA's annual Taste Of Bloomington event where the entire town can sample every BIRA restaurant's food.

Pizza Express, a Bloomington chain, had success in the past with Facebook pictures of their cups being posted somewhere in the community.  Whoever guessed the correct location of the cup would win a food prize.  This made the Pizza X cups into icons for students and residents alike.  We wanted something like that for Charlie and BIRA.  We also noted that the more time it took for the players to guess the location, the more promotion we might need to run for that restaurant.

Here are some examples of the photos of Charlie.  On the left, he's at La Torre, a Mexican restaurant in town here.  On the right, he's at Dat's, a cajun diner.  Through the campaign, we could show the amount of edible diversity in the city to USA Today and get people from one side of town to the other to try more BIRA restaurants.  He also appeared in photos with nearly every BIRA restaurant's crew at our Taste of Bloomington event.

We were lucky enough to get into the top 10 of USA Today's poll and also garnered a pretty large audience of students and local residents alike.  The contest started in June of 2012 and as soon as the students came back in August, they were ready to win shirts.  We stopped the contest in October as we ran out of shirts, but Charlie is still known to this day as he's the mascot for BIRA.