BAES Chicken

BAES Chicken opened November 1, 2019 as the first organic fried chicken joint​ in Portland. With an oversaturation of restaurant personalities on social media, BAES needed to give people a reason to follow yet another food-forward account.

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 relying on visuals, I decided to focus on building audience engagement with a funny, meme-like personality.

Our fan base became “baes fam,” fostering a sense of community. At the time, this was a bit of a bold move, setting us apart from other restaurants that focused on sharing high quality images of their food, presumably taken by food photographers.

Trademarks of the BAES voice included using lowercase letters, sometimes rambling humor, references to memes, and different fonts to emphasize humor. The same font style was always used in Stories to increase brand recognition in a sea of IG Stories.

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 have a distinct voice and personality online. As a result of successfully engaging with our community, BAES was able to rely on user generated content and purely focus on creating funny content that was easy to share and fun to consume.