In 2017, after coming across Yuu Japanese Tapas’ in-store promotion for a free drink, I approached the restaurant with an idea. I was convinced their marketing could be done in a more effective way, so I pitched them the idea of hosting a $5 Ramen Challenge event.
At the time, food challenges were a very popular trend, and quite a few restaurants had already created their own eating challenges - usually in the form of finishing a large amount of food in a short time.
But, we wanted to do things differently & take things up a notch!
For the $5 Ramen Challenge, our goal was focused on maximizing brand awareness and making the event super accessible.
The goal of the $5 Ramen Challenge was to maximize brand awareness and make the event super accessible.
Instead of following the traditional food challenge model and creating a huge bowl of ramen to finish in a short time, we decided to offer a food challenge with a caveat.
The rules for the challenge were simple: if a person completes a regular-sized ramen bowl (including the broth) in under 10 minutes, they will only pay $5 for it. Patrons who are unable to finish the ramen in time will have to pay the full $16 price.
The reason the challenge was structured this way is that it allowed us to appeal to two types of customers:
1) People who can eat really fast because it's an easy challenge
2) People who are excited to try because the $5 Ramen Challenge is a lot more achievable than your typical eating contest
Our goal was to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible, and our strategy worked!
This event was able to bring in people from all over the lower mainland to this local restaurant in Richmond. There were line-ups going out the door and wait times that lasted over 3+ hours throughout the entire week.
The event page also garnered a lot of community engagement with people trying to beat each other's best time and there was a ton of user-generated content from people posting on social.
One of the contestants was even able to finish the challenge in under 56 seconds! We decided to capitalize on this opportunity and engage the community to try and beat this top score. We even created a "letter-box"-style video (which was popular at the time) and that video alone generated 453,000 in social reach.
The $5 Ramen Challenge campaign generated over $12,000+ in sales, 4 media publication features, and reached over 1,000,000+ social media impressions (organic & paid) in the span of 4 days.
