Work

• Menu Redesign
• Sauce Bottle Packaging
• Food and Sauce Naming
• Brand Voice
• Visual System

Think it's fun to scream for your team during the SuperBowl — in a packed restaurant with a cold beer and a bucket of 50 sauce-spun Honey BBQ^® wings? You should work with Buffalo Wild Wings. We laughed and planned and collaborated with this sharp, savvy client to rebrand their signature sauces and redesign their menu — for maximum revenue generation.

Hot food. Cool drinks. Good friends. Wall-to-wall sports.

That's Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar, one of the top ten fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country. Grab your friends and enter a world of entertainment — that starts with big-screen sports and continues with a series of eye-catching menus packed with wing trivia, insider info, customer proclamations, and party talk. And, of course, great food.

To create the new menu system, we worked with everyone from the CEO and CFO to food scientists, operations managers, franchise owners, even a nine-year-old fan who politely wrote requesting free wings.

The creative product shines — because it captures the authentic Buffalo Wild Wings experience: bold, bright, and brash. How else to communicate to a target audience who thinks it's fun to wolf down six Blazin'^® Wings in six minutes — without water. Or beer for that matter. (That particular punishment is called the Blazin'^® Challenge, and you're free to subject yourself to it at your neighborhood Buffalo Wild Wings.)

Serious sauce appeal

"More than a dozen signature sauces to spice up your world." That's a key differentiator of the Buffalo Wild Wings brand, so we proclaimed it — by redesigning the sauce bottle labels on a color continuum that ranges from smilin' (signified by greens and yellows) to screamin' (signified oranges and reds). As Buffalo Wild Wings develops new sauces in the future, our continuum can easily accommodate them.

Each sauce label features a bold Buffalo circle icon and, for the first time, a concise flavor description. (Previously, guests had to rely on the wait staff to learn whether, say, Caribbean Jerk™ was hotter than Mango Habanero™.)

We then created an entire menu page for these brand-defining sauces — letting guests see the entire lineup on the menu. The goal: boost retail sauce sales and position Buffalo Wild Wings as the leader in wing sauce.

Food financials — 70 percent of the revenue

Food contributes 70 percent of the revenue at Buffalo Wild Wings, according to the most recent earnings call. So behind the fun of our menu and sauce bottle redesign was solid science — to help our client increase gross profit and optimize the average check:

• Eye magnets. We designed the menu offerings to highlight top revenue items (those with a low food cost and a high contribution margin).
• Gaze motion. We specifically designed and named the menu categories to influence the way consumers will scan the menu.
• Primacy and recency. We capitalized on the fact that consumers are more likely to remember the first or last menu item they read.
• Cost-effective real estate. We wanted every single item on the center spread. We know our target audience. They have a game to watch. They're not the type to go flipping through some fussy, complicated, chaptered menu.

More revenue-driving expertise

The name of an entrée has a powerful effect on sales. We helped our client name numerous tasty new entrees, including Crispy Southwest Dippers™, Ribs and More Ribs™, and Crave-It! Combos™. Plus, we named a signature sauce — Asian Zing™ — giving it this description: sweet meets heat: a chili pepper, soy and ginger sauce.

A bold new icon

An important part of the new Buffalo Wild Wings visual system is the bold circle icon, which we created from the existing logo. We're working closely with our client on the use this exciting icon — rolling it out over the next several months on restaurant packaging, takeout packaging, and the new drink menu. Simple and clear, it will become an increasingly familiar symbol of the Buffalo Wild Wings brand.

An irreverent brand voice

"The future is later. The food is now." You can read that line (among hundreds of others) on the skillfully layered "wall of words" that encase the new menu. Called menu wraps, these colorful jackets literally wrap the actual menu with entertainment, giving each guest a different experience until the food arrives. (There are currently three different wraps, with plans for several more.)

From the screaming 68-point type that challenges the guest — "Not loud enough? Come back on Wing Tuesdays" — to the miniscule 5-point type insult — "If you have suggestions, corrections, clarifications, or questions about something you see here, too bad" — these wraps have become the voice of the brand, complete with laughs, taunts, trivia, cheers, and the noise created by people having fun.

Seriously, the menu Larsen created may look noisy and casual, but it's carefully constructed, typeface by typeface, color by color, message by message — because research indicates that the menu may be the only piece of printed advertising that consumers are virtually certain to read.