Student Project:
cinzetti rebrand
BRANDING / RESESRCH
2017
Solo Team
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
Problem Question: How can modern branding help to present the customers of Cinzetti with an authentic Italian cuisine experience?
Cinzetti is a well known Italian buffet restaurant located in Northglenn, Colorado and Kansas City, Kansas. They’re a restaurant that focuses on creating a unique experience unlike any other, not only with their food but also with the design and layout of their restaurant. Their style of restaurant is an Italian Piazza inside an authentic Tuscany village with cobbed floors and signs.
However, staff at Cinzetti admit that it could use a modernized update. Cinzetti represents authentic Italian food that provides customers with an experience they will never forget, but they’re missing that modernized feel added to the experience. They don’t want the Tuscan Village and authentic mood to completely disappear from the restaurant’s re brand, however, they admit it is time for an update.
The restaurant caters from all different parts of Italy, rather than just one region in order to enhance the cultural experience the customer gets when going to the restaurant. Each section of food has several selections from different cities, regions and parts of Italy.
From customers and from actual experience at the restaurant, the best way to describe the dinning experience at Cinzetti is a casual fine-dining. Their staff (from the chefs to the waiters) are in their up most, pristine and elegant garments with button up tops, slick black shoes and an white apron around their waists, to wine and beverage
specific waiters that cater to each table, and to the wine glasses and folded napkins on their tables, Cinzetti has acquired that fine dining-feel. However, customers agree the best part of this experience: Not dealing with the wait that comes with fine-dinning. Being a buffet, customers are easily and quickly brought to a table, where they can get up and collect as much food as they want, as often as they
would like, without having to order and wait for the waiter to bring their food. This helps to give that casual feel to the restaurant and it’s important for the re brand to acquire both types of tones for the experience.
The most important words to remember about Cinzetti are: Experience, authentic, modern, casual and fine-dining.
WHatis
the brand wheel?
The brand wheel helps to focus on what elements are important to the rebrand campaign for Cinzetti. By utilizing the brand wheel I was able to focus on three areas of user interaction and experience with CInzetti's brand. This allowed me to quickly come up with several ideas and brainstorm possibilities for the campaign.
The Inspire portion of the brand wheel is meant to capture the attention of users and bring them back to the original brand. This engagement utilizes emotions and experiences in order to promote the brand and get users familiar with the brand.
The Engage portion of the brand wheel is the actual user interaction and experience with the brand itself on a physical, social and digital sense within the world. This gets people familiar with the brand and talking about the brand.
Finally the Advocate portion of the brand wheel is what gets brand loyalty with users and customers. This portion allows for users to converse and speak up about the brand themselves on a digital and physical level through social media and advertising.
WHAT'S THE BRAND?
Mood Boards: Casual fine dining without the loss of an authentic experience.
When experiencing the Cinzetti brand, customers should have the experience of Italian gourmet cuisine. The restaurant and the brand itself should feel as if they are making their own journey to modern Italy. The brand should enhance their taste buds and make them feel as if they are in a modern Tuscany village. Cinzetti is meant to be a brand that feels upscale and high priced without the price tag. This allows for its customers to be a broad range of families, middle class workers and the younger generation.
The brand should include clean typography, that is thin and legible to feel like it is on a modern plane of design, with a flair of old Italian roots. The typography is a more modern and pristine look to present itself as a higher restaurant.
The color palette will include Earth toned color palette, with hints of red to bring back the Italian village roots of the restaurant. Cinzetti's doesn't want to completely clean the plate of its style and brand, and customers are already familiar with the Earthy Tuscany village colors and feel to the restaurant. Instead, we are combining old school styles of Italy with new, modern design implications.
Finally, the experience at Cinzetti should make the customer feel elegant, as if they were fine dining. Cinzetti goes out of its way for an authentic Italian buffet at affordable prices, and they need a push towards the high end cuisine that comes out of Italian restaurants.
Color Pallete: Casual fine dining without the loss of an authentic experience.
The color choices picked to represent an earthy tone, without pulling too much browns or tans, while tying in the green shrubbery and plant life within a Tuscan village alongside the ocean shore in Italy. The color has a light pastel feel to most of it’s colors, even down to an off white and off black for the logo and typography, to give the brand a more modern but softer feel than its current vibrant and bright colors. We want the food and the experience to speak for themselves rather than the actual palette of the logo. Overall, we want our colors to best represent the mood and feel of a Tuscan village kept on the edge of the seaside shore inside Italy.
what are the next steps?
Future Plans: Further Research and UI re-design.
As a school project, this project became a successful research project and introductory to UI and UX patterns for this app. It was successful in our product and user research, along with validating the need for a solution like this in the world. However, looking back on the project, there are still several flaws that need to be fixed such as continuing to re-design the UI patterns of the app, to match those already existing that users are currently used to. There are also several more components to our app, other than what we currently had designed as a team and in the future, I would want to explore all of these user tasks and components to get the full potential of the app's functionality.
For now, this project serves as a good base for a research project onto creating a solution for women that walk alone at night, but further testing and research will be needed before this idea could ever potentially become proposed.