Restaurant booking network Dimmi says that the consumer market for bookings is “at a tipping point” and it's looking to push the balance in its favour with the launch of its first media-bought advertising run.
The campaign, launched this week, is purely outdoor and digital, leveraging its recently revamped tagline “Reserve the Moment”. It follows its acquisition by Travel goliath TripAdvisor at the end of last month.
Speaking to AdNews, Dimmi head of marketing and partnerships Mark Moran said core to the campaign is Dimmi's first media buy which is hinged on static outdoor. It sees 53 diners write what special moment they were celebrating at restaurants on the table cloths, after using the Dimmi booking system. Using a network of OOH special builds, the table cloths will now be shown across Sydney and Melbourne in June, with a further roll-out in other major cities later in the year.
Moran said the use of static OOH was a concious decision by the brand.
“We’re a digital brand but we're really in the business of real world moments so its always hard to put those things together,” Moran said. “The reality is our magic happens in restaurants and we wanted to take some of those moments our customers have and allow them to write their stories in our restaurants.”
Moran said that his agenda for the brand this year is eyeing off habits, namely the tendency of consumers to pick up a phone and book a restaurant directly, by trying to reposition itself as a platform for “inspiration” for a particular life moment.
“The consumer led growth in the market is kind of at a tipping point and there is still an awful lot of growth in the market for people booking restaurants online,” Moran said.
“At the moment a lot of people still just pick up the phone because that's the way they've done it for the last 20 years and it's just changing that habit.”
“It's our job to put Dimmi into that consideration set when people think about looking for inspiration. We want to position our brand into that sort of consideration set when you're thinking about the moment that people want to have.”
This latest campaign was facilitated by Dimmi's creative agency, The Change Community, and media agency OMD. While Moran noted that more advertising was up Dimmi's sleeve in the recent future, he ruled out the use of big television buys noting that despite the acquisition, it was important that Dimmi retains its startup feel.
Moran said pushing that consideration piece will be key to Dimmi's marketing activity, with habit changing taking two forms.
“I think a big part of it is new customer acquisition, and the other piece is repeat purchase,” Moran said. “So we do a lot of work focused on people who have used us once: we go back and tell them all the other great reasons to use us.”
The new customer acquisition means a greater focus on branding campaigns as well as using events to give people a feel for the brand. Dimmi was recently part of the Taste of Sydney festival with more events planned in the second half of the year.
Moran said that building stories was also key with a content push planned to use the stories featured in the outdoor campaign.
“We want to get people to recognise the brand if they're looking for a bit of inspiration and then follow that up with a bunch of digital and social campaigns that continue those stories we're creating, and hopefully have a multi-layered touchpoint approach,” Moran said.
“It's getting people to try it. You've got to lead that and show people the way.”
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