Project Overview
Discover Persia by the Sea
An 18-month integrated marketing plan for Brighton's highest-rated Persian restaurant; resolving a paradox where the food was already exceptional and almost nobody outside its dining room knew it existed.
IMC Strategy
Behavioural Design
Experiential & AR
Brand Identity
Team
Individual project — strategy, research and every piece of creative and data design my own.
My Role
Full IMC strategy,
Behavioural research
Campaign identity,
All experiential and AR concept design
Visual deisgn
Timeline
18-month campaign plan
M1 – M18
Status
Strategy proposal built for a real, independently owned restaurant.
Not commissioned or delivered — every figure below is modelled.
Challenge
The best restaurant in the area had almost no one outside its dining room who knew it.
Shiraz was ranked #1 in Hove on TripAdvisor — 4.9 stars, 748+ reviews, a 95% recommend rate — and sat at under 5% unaided brand awareness across Brighton's 290,000 residents. This isn't a product problem. It's a visibility problem, and it reframes where a budget should go: not into fixing the food, but into building the missing connective tissue between an excellent product and the market around it.
What's working
4.9★
748+ reviews, #1 in Hove
95%
Recommend rate
What's invisible
<5%
Unaided brand awareness
0–3
Social posts per year (target: 12–15/month)
Instagram told the same story: 3,834 followers against competitors sitting at 5,000+ — including lower-rated restaurants outperforming Shiraz purely on visibility. Against a conservative £500,000 addressable-market ceiling, the gap was modelled at roughly £682,000 in lost annual revenue.
11.8M
Annual visitors to Brighton
200+
Competing restaurants creating search noise
36%
Of visitors actively seeking authentic cuisine
Market context compiled during the research phase; figures modelled against publicly available tourism data.
Strategy
Nine ideas, each pointed at a specific, buildable decision.
What mattered wasn't which idea sounded most sophisticated on a slide — it was whether each one survived being turned into something a customer actually sees, reads, or experiences. Every idea below maps to a real decision in the plan.
Decision 01
Two peaks, one strong ending
People judge an experience mainly by its most intense moment and how it ends, not by the average of everything in between.
Engineered a five-stage sensory timeline with two deliberate emotional peaks, the Taarof hospitality ritual on arrival, and a coastal sunset moment mid-meal, followed by a strong, designed ending: a small farewell gift and the invitation to start the Persian Passport journey.
NPS 7 → 9
Modelled target, tied directly to this experience design
Peak
Arrive
Taarof hospitality ritual
Discover
Menu ,table-side stories
Peak
Experience
Coastal sunset dining moment
Conclude
Meal winds down
End
Farewell
Gift + Passport invitation
The peak and the end are judged separately from the middle of the visit; the farewell moment is deliberately designed as a strong ending, not treated as a third peak.
Decision 02
Removing the risk at the moment of deciding
Booking hesitation usually comes from perceived risk, not a lack of interest, how much control someone feels they have over the outcome matters as much as whether they want to come.
Instant confirmation, SMS reminders and clearer ad copy were designed specifically to raise perceived control at the exact moment someone decides whether to book.
5.2 → 6.8+
Modelled booking-intention score (out of 10)
Decision 03
Making what we say, do, and what customers confirm all line up
A brand's message only works if what it says, what it does, and what customers experience afterwards all tell the same story.
Audited 240 touchpoints, signage, menu language, social copy, staff briefing, in-restaurant experience, for alignment between what's promised, what's delivered, and what customers confirm, then rebuilt the weakest links.
94.3%
Modelled consistency score, vs. 61–75% industry benchmark
The remaining six, compressed for scannability:
Approach
Applied as
Modelled result
Positioning check
Triad attribute elicitation across three competitor restaurants to find Shiraz's true positioning attributes
94% attribute consistency
Budget allocation logic
Importance–performance mapping to split budget between protecting strengths and closing gaps
Direct input into the £117,200 split
Reciprocity & social proof
A farewell gift, plus authority and social-proof cues across email and in-restaurant touchpoints
Review & referral uplift
Collection psychology
Blind-box-style mechanics behind the Persian Passport loyalty journey
78% completion rate
Top-of-mind awareness
Branded-search cost economics built around staying front-of-mind
CAC £35 → £8
Balanced measurement
A 16-metric dashboard across financial, customer, process and growth perspectives
15/16 KPIs on target
Objectives
Three work packages, each doing a different job with the same £117,200.
Package
Objective
From → to
Budget
WP1
Build top-of-mind awareness
<5% → 40% unaided recall
£36,300
WP2
Convert tourist demand via SEM
600 → 2,360 bookings/yr
£60,800
WP3
SDG-12 sustainability positioning
NPS 7 → 9
£20,100
Budgets reconciled to sum exactly to the £117,200 total.
Phased investment across the 18-month plan
Early · £45,300
Peak · £50,400
Optimise · £21,500
M1
M18
Investment weighted toward the middle of the plan, once early awareness groundwork is in place and SEM capture can scale against it.
Journey
Built around one named persona and a seven-stage journey, not a generic funnel.
Primary Persona
"Discovery Dana"
Cultural tourist, 35–55, £45K+ household income; a 450,000-strong segment across Brighton's visitor base.
Modelled 3-year customer lifetime value of £1,039.
14.4:1
Modelled word-of-mouth ratio
Each satisfied customer cycle seeding new awareness
£1,039
Modelled 3-year CLV
Discovery Dana persona
The seven-stage journey
Every stage carries a mapped emotional state, a documented friction point, and a root-cause read on the psychology behind it, for example, Taarof etiquette discomfort among first-time diners is addressed through staff storytelling rather than a menu footnote.
Creative
The identity, the loyalty programme, and the experiences that turn strategy into something you can walk into.
The Big Idea
Billboard Creative — the campaign's visual signature
"Discover Persia by the Sea", journey through 2,500 years of Persian heritage at Brighton Beach
A visual language built to travel.
The campaign system combines coastal teal, Persian-inspired ornament and warm, tactile tones.
It is designed to work across large-format media, intimate in-restaurant details and mobile-first content.
Coastal colour world
Teal grounds the campaign in Brighton's seafront; saffron gold adds warmth, appetite and discovery.
Editorial warmth
A high-contrast serif delivers craft and heritage, balanced with a clear, modern sans-serif for digital usability.
Stories worth tasting.
Wave × cloche motif
A recurring symbol joining sea, hospitality and culinary discovery into one distinctive campaign mark.
⌇◡⌇
Inviting, sensory, generous
"Come curious. Leave with a story." The voice makes cultural discovery feel personal, never instructional.
Taste the journey.
Social & content channels
Instagram; food-craft close-ups, chef-personality story, guest reposts and reviews repackaged as content.
TikTok ; "The SECRET to perfect Persian rice?" 4.8M modelled views, top-of-funnel awareness in a bite-sized format.
The Persian Passport; a gamified loyalty journey
A physical passport booklet covering the 12 regions of Iran, with a monthly mystery-menu reveal delivered in a wax-sealed envelope and marked with a gold-foil stamp. Built on collection psychology rather than a points system.
Bronze
Entry tier; first three visits
Silver
Mid-journey; six regions collected
Gold
Full passport; all 12 regions
£3,740
Modelled CLV for passport members; 4× casual engagement
78%
Modelled completion rate vs. 12% traditional loyalty benchmark
Experiential & phygital design
Digital & Sustainability
Capturing demand that already exists, before creating any new demand at all.
52% of the whole budget went to WP2 — search — deliberately. Awareness spend is a bet on the future; SEM captures people who are already looking for exactly this. That ordering is the single most defensible budget decision in the plan.
Search & Local Discovery
SEM and local SEO capturing high-intent demand with coastal,
cultural and cuisine-led keyword language.
Role: make restaurant easy to find
Lifecycle Email
Five trigger-led journeys:
welcome, booking recovery, post-visit review, passport urgency, reactivation.
Role: make every visit feel personal
Phygital Storytelling
QR, AR and social interactions extending menu stories and sustainability proof into shareable content.
Role: make heritage participatory
Website CVR — before
12%
→
Modelled target
18%
Booking completion, same redesign
68 → 88%
SEM architecture
A four-campaign structure — brand keywords, generic + coastal keywords, competitor intercept, remarketing (RLSA) — with coastal keywords carrying 70% lower CPC and 3× conversion vs. generic terms.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile optimisation, schema markup, citation building and a review-generation loop, modelled to move Local Pack ranking from #8 to #1 over 18 months.
Email automation
Five trigger-based sequences — welcome, booking recovery, post-visit review, passport urgency, 45-day reactivation — over 1,200 modelled sends, including a "one message, three audiences" personalised campaign split by vegetarian, occasion-diner and cultural-explorer segments.
Micro-influencer
£250 total investment (gifted experience + fee) with a 12.4K-follower Brighton food blogger. Modelled 15,240 reach, £22.73 cost per booking, 127% ROI.
993% ROI appears in the deck too, but only as the SEM work-package's own sub-metric (£60,800 investment against £697,500 attributed revenue), never as the campaign-level figure.
I've kept it scoped to this section deliberately, rather than letting it float free as an unlabelled headline number.
Sustainability as positioning, not garnish
The "Nothing Wasted" campaign is built on real operational change, torshi pickling of vegetable trim, an 18-hour bone-broth programme, portion flexibility, verified by a third party and reported through a public transparency dashboard, specifically to avoid greenwashing.
1,464kg
Modelled annual waste diverted (35% reduction)
£5,600
Modelled revenue generated from waste streams
7 → 9
Modelled NPS uplift
Impact
One headline figure, modelled, not five conflicting ones.
Different slides in the original deck produce different ROI figures depending on what's being measured, campaign-level, a single work package, even a single tactic. I've deliberately headlined with one number here: 145.8% projected campaign ROI on the full £117,200 budget across 18 months. Everything else in this section is either that same figure's supporting evidence, or explicitly scoped to the work package it belongs to.
145.8%
Modelled campaign ROI
£117,200 budget, 18-month plan
15/16
Balanced Scorecard KPIs modelled on target
Across financial, customer, process and growth perspectives
<5→40%
Unaided awareness
600→2,360
Tourist bookings/yr
£1,039
Modelled CLV
94.3%
Consistency score
These are modelled outcomes from a plan built for a real business, I never ran it. The model is conservative in the places that matter most, particularly the £500,000 TAM ceiling against what's probably a larger real opportunity, and I can walk through the assumption behind every single figure on this page.
Lets
design
build
create
Something Impactful