At Studiocom, another team worked on Baskin-Robbins website (I was on Dunkin'), but I was pretty familiar with their frustrations—the franchisees were not heavily incentivized to do a lot of "newfangled" stuff, from a service design perspective, which severely limited the ambitions of folks working on their business.
By the time I arrived at Digitas, I had figured out how to sell ambitious things to recalcitrant franchisees, and this ability culminated in a seat-of-the-pants pitch to a room full of 30 of the biggest BR franchise holders in America—we won the work.
The big insight we brought to the table was simply this: 83% of the "calendar" occasions that bring people in for ice cream are not Hallmark holidays. BR was heavily dependent on the big calendar windows (Mother's Day, Easter, etc.) to promote new flavors, but most of the time people were coming in to celebrate Suzy's Big Game, not Valentine's Day.
So, we devised functionality that made it desirable for folks to share their iCal with us. This allowed us to personalize offers for them, based on the actual events in their lives (without being too creepy about it).
Above you'll find a man-on-the-stree customer video we shot at various BR locations around Boston. I showed it to the franchisees just before presenting the app concept—my way of making sure the end-user remained the focus of the conversation.
The app itself launched for real in 2016 (and by the time you read this, it will probably have been redesigned multiple times), but below are some pulls from the deck that I originally presented, followed by some of the promotional collateral used to launch it.
