Launching a new Queenstown restaurant to the nation with media relations

The challenge

The owners of wildly popular Queenstown restaurant, Flame Bar and Grill, were just about to open their doors to their newest offering, Sunfire, when they called Scope Communications to help with the launch.

Located on Steamer Wharf, Sunfire’s cuisine merges the flavours and culinary techniques of South Africa and Spain. Solid-fuel cooking is a prominent trend in overseas dining and Sunfire is the first restaurant in the Southern Lakes to serve cuisine cooked in a charcoal oven.

Our brief was to gain media exposure to audiences in Auckland, locally and the rest of New Zealand. With the doors opening in a few days’ time, we needed to act fast to achieve our objectives.

Our approach

The short timeframe to opening, a limited budget and the clients’ desire to not hold a big launch event, meant that our focus would be on media and stakeholder relations. We tapped into the various news hooks available to us to craft quality media pitches to key media outlets, supported by a media release.

We reached out to eight journalists from national media outlets, providing each with exclusive, bespoke media pitches, and connected Sunfire owners Jonathan and Lou to share their story. For one outlet who wanted the story but didn’t have the resources to write it, we wrote and supplied a print-ready story to them.

We also leveraged our relationships with key team members from Destination Queenstown, hosting them for an exceptional dining experience to help them understand the offering and communicate the message to DQ’s tourism channels.

The results

Proactive media engagement resulted in 100% success rate, generating coverage across all targeted media outlets (newspaper, magazine and online) and a few extras. Notable mentions include coverage in Stuff, Viva, Otago Daily Times, Hospitality Business Magazine, The Press and Food Ticker – to name a few. The cumulative potential reach from these media mentions was 499,084and the combined advertising space rate (ASR) was $207,746NZD.

Importantly, our client was thrilled with the results and noticed the difference that PR had made to the opening of their new business: “Thank you so much for all the work you have done for us. The exposure by Jo Elwin from Viva has been exceptional with people arriving at Sunfire the day they arrive from Auckland saying they had just read the article.”

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Are you looking for an effective way to launch your brand with the help of PR and marketing communications and media relations? Contact us today for a free, no-obligation chat.