How The Cheesecake Shop Increased Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement Through The Komo Platform

Industry: Food & Beverage

Customer: The Cheesecake Shop

Solution: Digital Engagement Hub

Summary

Facing a series of marketing and tech challenges, The Cheesecake Shop was in need of a new way to connect to its customers during the holiday period. With an adaptable ‘plug and play’ structure, The Cheesecake Shop engaged Komo to create a campaign that spread some classic holiday cheer.

About The Cheesecake Shop

The Cheesecake Shop is a renowned franchise with 225 cake bakeries and over 2000 employees across Australia and New Zealand. The company sells hand-crafted delicious cakes that have been loved by generations of customers since its early beginnings in 1991. 

Introduction

Looking to increase customer brand engagement and overall awareness, The Cheesecake Shop identified an opportunity to run two campaigns over the Australian holiday period, celebrating both Christmas and Australia Day. With the aim to remain front of mind throughout the entire period, The Cheesecake Shop needed a strategy that was both engaging and memorable, building consumer relationships in the long term.

A renewed approach to digital engagement was at the core of the marketing strategy. The Cheesecake Shop wanted to engage customers through gamification who wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with the brand through brand and product advertising. Komo was enlisted to help The Cheesecake Shop create a digital hub for shoppers to dive into over the holiday period with chances to win, play, and explore.

The Challenge

With the holidays fast approaching, The Cheesecake Shop team were after a cost-effective and timely way to engage consumers through these campaigns. After noticing a rise in social media scams, however, tactics such as competitions and quizzes became difficult to host on channels such as Facebook and Instagram.

Additionally, being able to incorporate engaging gamified content on owned channels was simply not possible within the Cheesecake Shop's current framework and thus the brand had been unable to fully tap into the power of gamification to engage consumers online.

“If we were to run something like this on social media, it would just be a nightmare and it would be way too time-consuming. We just wouldn’t do it.”

- Minu Kaneshakarnar, Brand Manager, The Cheesecake Shop

Why The Cheesecake Shop Chose Komo

The Cheesecake Shop needed an effective, time-saving solution to roll out a campaign that would cut through the Christmas clutter and remain strong throughout the holiday period.

Komo provided an effective plug-and-play solution to the marketing team with an engaging digital destination for consumers to dive into. With an easy-to-use interface and Canva integration, The Cheesecake Shop branding could be easily incorporated in the hub and updated to suit each holiday campaign.

In what would have originally taken three months and specialised assistance, the two campaigns could be implemented entirely by the marketing team, offering a timely and cost-effective solution. Additionally, the Komo platform had the capability to gather first-party data, strengthening the brand’s position for future campaigns.

Creating engaging experiences

The Cheesecake Shop hub incorporated a variety of engaging gamification tactics to connect with consumers across the holiday period. Whether in store or online, shoppers could participate in:

• Scratch and win
• Live trivia
• Secret code
• Personality quiz

The Results 

Despite the clutter of holiday marketing, The Cheesecake Shop saw an incredibly large uptake across the Christmas and Australia Day campaigns, including: 

• 94,000 clicks
• 56,000 entries across both campaigns
• 93% completion rate on scratch and win and personality quiz game cards

Overall Results

As a brand that has been around for generations, The Cheesecake Shop saw a renewed sense of community over the holiday period, truly connecting customers to the brand’s essence and setting the business up for future successes.