ANATOMY OF A BRAND
Stuffed Crust Pizza. Hence, the marketing campaign “Better. Believe it!”
We agreed with our franchise advisory
board that to properly relaunch the brand,
we first needed to create and activate a
unique vision of its future. That vision
would help identify the Cicis ideal, while
inspiring our franchisee community and
our employees.
Cicis began as the first of its kind—the
first restaurant to offer an unlimited pizza
buffet. We did things differently 30 years ago, which is
why we decided to reframe
the brand to set us apart from
the competition with a different kind of relevance to our
target consumers—relevance
that was more than just pizza.
Defining the new brand
vision
Working with our design partners and our franchisees we
set out to create a new brand
vision to fulfill our strategic
outcomes. Together we developed its identity, personality, and new restaurant design.
Through the use of demographic and
psychographic data, our target consumer
was comprehensively identified as the
“Connected Idealist”: a person who craves
the freedom to be themself and who encourages independence and originality for
themself and for their families. Coupled
with this target consumer, we clarified
our brand character as “The Maverick”:
independent, carefree, bold, confident,
energetic, and expressive.
Visually, Cicis moved its brand forward
with its boldest evolution yet. The Cicis
logo took a clean, simple, and contemporary new approach. “Pizza” was removed
from our name to give life to our modifier “Beyond Pizza.” This reinforced the
notion of Cicis offering pasta, salad, soup,
desserts, and a fun game room experience—more than just another pizza place.
The logo visualizes this as well, uniting
various colors around a central point to
represent variety and unique individuals
coming together.
In keeping with the focus on cleanliness and simplicity, the CiCi’s apostrophe
was removed and the second “C” became
lowercased, completing the conversion
from CiCi’s Pizza to simply Cicis.
Bringing the brand to life in a contemporary yet comfortable environment was
a crucial part of the rebrand. Our partnerships with Sterling-Rice Group on the
brand and design, and with Atlanta-based
Back Lot Productions helped develop
an energetic color palette for a friendly
and inviting atmosphere. This included a
creative space design that’s both inspiring
and distinctive, with zones for individuals
or families and groups, as well as a game
room with its own entertaining theme.
The restaurant experience will eventually include a new technology component
that enables guests to satisfy their unique
tastes, echoing the “Feeding Individuality” positioning.
Next up: Execution
The rollout of the new branding
to restaurants in the construction
pipeline, as well as those undergoing renovations and upgrades,
is already under way. We are very
pleased with our new restaurant
prototype design, which will debut
in the second quarter of 2016.
As the leadership team, and
in partnership with our Franchise Advisory Council, we are
incredibly excited about the direction
our brand is headed. A great deal of
time and effort went into making sure
our new logo, our updated look, and
our new prototype fit what the brand
represents from its roots.
We firmly believe that these changes
are the right moves for the brand. It’s an
exciting time for Cicis. n
Darin Harris is CEO of Cicis, which has
nearly 450 restaurants in 32 states.
Franchiseupdate I S S U E I , 2016
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