What is Yogurtland?
Yogurtland is a self-serve frozen yogurt franchise that allows customers to fill their yogurt cup with a variety of different flavors and toppings. With over 250 locations, they are the leading frozen yogurt brand and have stores both across the U.S. and internationally. Their target audience mostly consists of younger children and families.
The Problem
UMA Design is responsible for recreating and brainstorming ways to create an intuitive interaction space for Yogurtland Marketing to better communicate and motivate local stores to participate in local store marketing (LSM). Through franchisee interviews and campaign ideation, UMA will design a more intuitive method as well as campaign assets to get local store owners to be more engaged in local marketing.
My Role
As a design consultant, I worked with my teammates and project managers to conduct research and create deliverables for Yogurtland’s marketing team. During bi-weekly check-ins, we presented our findings, ideas, and designs to our points of contact, and then utilized their feedback and follow-up questions to guide us through more brainstorming and iteration. At the end of the semester, we presented one final deliverable with detailed research findings, campaign mockups, and key recommendations.
HMW
To guide us with our research and ideation, we began by asking:
For our preliminary research, Yogurtland gave us a spreadsheet of franchise owners to interview. In each of these interviews, we asked about their LSM routines, factors holding them back from further community engagement, hopes for future events, and feedback for Yogurtland Corporate. Here were our key insights:
Key Findings
In-person marketing is more successful and well-liked by franchisee owners than social media marketing
Directly reaching out to schools is one of the most common and successful forms of local store marketing
Franchisees do not make their own assets because of more immediate responsibilities
Franchisees rely on YL Corporate to bring in new customers while they focus on customer retention
Key Deliverables
Detailed franchisee personas based on interviews
Digital LSM Toolkit with Yogurtland marketing policies and procedures
Original campaign ideas and assets tailored to Yogurtland's audience
After collecting research and creating franchisee personas to better understand our goal, we split our final deliverable into two main segments: a local store marketing toolkit to make LSM more accessible and understandable, and YL-wide campaigns to lessen the time each franchisee would need to spend on creating material.
The Idea
Once a year, Yogurtland will host a contest where customers can submit their drawings to be printed onto Yogurtland cups. This contest will be judged by age categories, and runner-ups recieve vouchers for free yogurt while winners will additionally get their drawing printed onto YL cups nationwide. Theme ideas include “Memories with Yogurtland” and “Inspired by flavors”
Positioning
Both “Doodle for Google” and the Starbucks “White Cup Contest” were extremely successful at garnering the attention of the public, especially those of students within the elementary to high school age range. This contest would keep the Yogurtland name circulating around communities while providing a creative outlet for artistic students nationwide.
The Idea
Annually on the week of Earth Day, customers are invited to bring their own cups to Yogurtland. Whether it’s a Christmas mug, a mason jar, or a teacup, customers can fill up to whichever size cup they bring and receive a certain percentage off their next purchase.
Positioning
By drawing attention to reusable containers and providing a fun, innovative way for customers to partake in sustainability, this campaign would showcase Yogurtland’s awareness of sustainable efforts.
This was my first time designing physical assets like playbills, coupons, and cups, so I found it super fun to experiment with different creative directions and styles! I also thought that this was a great experience to practice designing within their existing design system and build on feedback from the Yogurtland marketing managers. Overall, I really enjoyed this project and would love to work on more projects that involve both visual design and marketing strategy.
