BAES Chicken

BAES Chicken opened November 1, 2019 as the first organic fried chicken joint​ in Portland. With the oversaturation of restaurants on social media, BAES needed to give people a reason to follow yet another trendy restaurant online.

Local activation

We kickstarted the hype with cross promotion via Downtown Portland and a 1000 sandwich giveaway for our grand opening. This created an opportunity to grab media attention with a line around the block for the newest Micah Camden establishment.

pictured: full patio + press coverage by OregonLive

Voice & brand identity strategy

Rather than rely on visuals, I decided to focus on cultivating audience engagement with a bold, meme-like personality.

Trademarks of the BAES voice included using lowercase letters, rambling humor, informality, references to memes, and cursive or medieval fonts commonly used in captions to emphasize humor.

The same font style (with a signature bright red highlight) was always used in Stories to increase brand recognition in a sea of IG Stories.

Our fan base became “baes fam,” fostering a cult-like sense of community. This was a bit of a bold move at the time, setting us apart from other restaurants leading their social strategy with polished images and refined captions.

This proved to be the right move, as we quickly amassed almost 5k followers in just five months - organically.

As fans tagged BAES in their IG Stories, BAES reposted each one with a caption (usually short and sweet) using irreverent humor. This significantly bolstered our following as:

  • Followers would share funny reposts with friends, increasing our overall reach for new potential followers

  • Followers getting reposted would screenshot and share their funny Story from BAES onto their own Stories, reinforcing a culture of tagging BAES to get featured (and so on & so forth)

  • The more Story mentions we received and featured, the more people would feel compelled to experience BAES for themselves

In conclusion…

Due to the omnipresence of popular fried chicken sandwiches already available in Portland, it was crucial to develop a distinct voice and personality online. As a result of successfully engaging with our community, BAES was able to rely on user generated content (saving a considerable amount of money), while keeping the focus on funny content that was easy to share and fun to consume.