Wing Zone has completed a comprehensive brand make-over of its franchise operation with a total focus on flavor. Design Coup Inc. a brand development agency in Decatur, Georgia, used its Brand Story approach to reshape the brand message, food concept, graphics, and operations to celebrate Wing Zone's amazing flavors and its loyal Flavorholic customers.
Wing Zone was started in 1991 when the founders were still undergraduates at the University of Florida. Over the next two decades, Wing Zone grew into a robust franchise organization, yet the Wing Zone brand never fully developed a brand experience that equals the unique qualities of Wing Zone’s flavorful food – until now.
Wing Zone’s founder and president, Matt Friedman, was looking for a way to bring back the fun and vitality that launched Wing Zone in his college days. “The challenge was to capture the essence of Wing Zone so that consumers would instantly understand what we’re about,” Friedman says.
“We won lots of national awards and prided ourselves on our food, flavor, and operations,” Friedman explains. “But until now, we only seemed to communicate our winning attributes through the food itself. Design Coup latched onto flavor and pushed us hard to take our brand to a new plateau of awareness.”
“It takes more than a great product to connect to consumers,” says Michael Higgins, president of Design Coup. “We turned Wing Zone’s fabulous flavor into the 10-story superhero of the brand.”
Design Coup applied its Brand Story approach to tap into the core customer perceptions and benefits of Wing Zone’s food, delivery system, and its flavors. This approach ensures that the brand connects emotionally with consistent messaging, clear benefits, and credible positioning.
The flavor-focused brand was tested last month at a new Wing Zone location in the Bahamas. “We determined in our Brand Story development that the flavor concept would travel well internationally,” Higgins explains. “I personally went to the store opening. Customers were lined up and excited. Sales expectations were exceeded by 300 percent.”
The new flavor-focused brand experience includes:
- A new Wing Zone corporate identity
- A comprehensive brand platform to support the entire branding system
- A Flavorholics customer engagement campaign that celebrates the individual tastes and eccentricities that define people’s favorite flavors
- A trademarked Flavor FUZE cooking process for wings, fingers, shrimp, sandwiches, and more
- Descriptive new flavor names and descriptions that liven up the menu
- New Flavorholics graphics for the store interiors, website, and menus
- Digital menuboards that highlight Wing Zone’s funny Flavorholics
- A launch video to excite Wing Zone franchisee’s and make them emissaries of the new brand
