How Illegal Jack restaurant built brand through social media; Social Buzz Awards case study
This case study outlines how Edinburgh restaurant Illegal Jack’s South West Grill utilised the power of video sharing to drive awareness of and engagement with its brand.
Illegal Jack’s South West Grill is a contemporary tex-mex restaurant where all food is prepared fresh daily, to sit in or take out. Meals are prepared in front of the customer in a relaxed atmosphere fuelled by classic rock music. The relatively new business’ success has been based on creating a brand which engages personally with consumers. Use of video has played a key part in this.It’s clear once you have an understanding of social media that content is key: millions of videos are shared every day. Illegal Jacks’ first forays into this area were homemade amateur videos for the restaurant’s Facebook page and Twitter feed. The videos did generate some response, as well as being shared by people on behalf of the company. A month or so later one of them featured at the end of a local weekly news roundup on Youtube. I got in touch with the maker of the video (who unbeknown to me was a customer of our’s) via Twitter and he came in for a chat. But before we even met, he had posted one of the restaurant’s videos on how to eat a Burrito. At this point the video creation strategy began to become formalised. With the help of a willing customer who was doing film making studies at university, Illegal Jack’s produced The Illegal Jack (W)rap. Made exclusively by and with customers, it proved to be a huge hit with over 200 “shares” on Facebook, as well as dozens of retweets on Twitter. The music video also had two trailers promoting it which were released two weeks and one week respectively prior to the video itself. One week later the outtakes were also released.