June 18th, 2010 FIGO Pasta! Matching great marketing with a great website.

Hello again, everyone.  I’m back with another Theoretical Brand and Web Project.

My subject this time is: FIGO Pasta.
FIGO is a a name you may not be familiar with unless you live in and around the Atlanta area, but it is an fantastic Italian restaurant that focuses on the right things.

First, I would like to start off by saying that whoever is currently handling FIGO’s marketing, branding, interior design and customer experience is doing a wonderful job.  FIGO has a relaxing, authentic Italian, smooth ambiance, their logo is solid and classic, the menus are laid out nicely, they use professional and clean typefaces, the staff is always pleasant, and their tag-lines are great (“Be Yourself. Be FIGO.”).  So, I am by no means worried about FIGO’s ability to do business, do it well, and do it in style. All of this just makes it that much more shocking that their web presence is, well, downright reprehensible.

Great Sign and Logo

Fantastic-looking-and-tasting food.

Great Atmosphere

WAIT?!  This last one doesn’t fit.

We need to take a closer look. Let’s zoom in:

As you may have figured out, this is FIGO’s website.  It doesn’t match the rest of the experience at all.  You are probably thinking that if everything is all right, then there is no need to worry.  Who cares if they have a crappy website and good everything else, right?  Wrong.

I say this a lot and will continue to mention it: A brand is the sum of the experiences that people have with your company.  With companies that are exemplary, it can only hurt them more to have a weak link in the chain.  As a brand specialist, I tell clients that part of a good brand is looking good (that’s your identity), and the other part is delivering on your brand promises (things and expectations you create when people interact with your company or its identifying factors).

So, what’s wrong with this website besides not being too pleasing on the eyes?

1.  Bad First Impression | The first and most important sin of this website is that it is lying to me about FIGO.  Let’s say that I have never heard of FIGO; perhaps I am a tourist, visiting family, on business, or a new arrival in the Atlanta area.  Many people use a quick Google search and website look-up to evaluate a business, and this goes double for restaurants.  So, I land on this page.  What does it tell me about FIGO?

a. Well, for one, I will not think they care much about the details, because their text is abrasive and all jammed up against the edges of the website, the menu is noticably blurry and the website is a light shade of yellow, which makes it hard to read.

b. The pictures are slim, not very descriptive and not consistently placed.  Does not make me hungry, it actually makes me feel like they are not confident about their food, because they aren’t showing it to me in its full glory immediately.

c.  The menu section is just a PDF download, which is fine to have, but I am an American, and I am all about convenience: I should be able to read the menu in HTML text, and not be forced to download an actual menu to skim and look through the food.

d. The links are default blue links, no spacing or placement, and most of the things they tell me in type or say in copy are very haphazard.  It’s easy to type in on a web-page that you care about quality, but if you don’t demonstate that, then it doesn’t really work.  Imagine if I walked into a job interview 15 minutes late and told you I cared deeply about being punctual?  That would not establish any kind of trust in your mind.

2. Not encouraging interaction with the brand |
It is certainly true that the current website of FIGO is practically functional.  While it may not speed across the finish-line, it does achieve all the basics that a website should have.  Location information, access to a menu, specials info, contact info, about them, Twitter and Facebook links.

I don’t care who you are; you could be the best restaurant in Atlanta or you could be the worst.  No restaurant business does not want even more customers than they have now.  And unfortunately, the exact thing FIGO’s web presence does right now is only engage people who already like it on a basic and practical level.  Which is fine, but that doesn’t get you more customers, make you more money or increase the amount of times people will go to FIGO, and that’s the problem here.

a. First, the social media links have taken an EXTREME back-seat to everything on the website. They are only accessible via the homepage, are not promoted at the locations, and are not visible anywhere else.  I did not even know FIGO had a Twitter account until tonight, when I was looking hard at their website.  That’s a big deal.  In our current society, social media is extremely important, especially when brand exposure is everything and marketing copy gets you nothing.  Not only should I be able to find Facebook and Twitter from anywhere on the site, but I should be encouraged to join and interact.  People are lazy: they need easy-to-find , easy-to-use tools.  Otherwise, they will focus on something else.

b. Next, FIGO banks very much on the idea that they are about good friends, good times, and good food.  Just like any marketing copy, that’s easy to say or type and easy to ignore.  Not so easy to ignore if I can engage the viewer’s attention with proof: people interacting with Facebook, posting pictures of themselves enjoying FIGO, posting beautiful food, and getting excited about being involved with FIGO!!!!!! (Sorry, got myself excited about it.)

c. Which brings me to the Locations page.  Right now, it’s a grid table with a link to pages with no photos, and a link to MapQuest.  Again, functional, but does not ENGAGE the user.  First, you need pictures.  It makes it easier to find and it makes people excited.  I found 20+ pictures of all the locations online with simple searches, so it is worth the time to just snap a few pictures of each location.  Next, we should have an embeded Google Maps, Bing, or Yahoo! Maps. Linking is a thing of the past; show people without a click,exactly where the location is.

d. The Menu page.  I don’t know about everybody else, but I HATE downloading PDFs on the internet.  Especially on my iPhone, even though I know the phone can do it.  I don’t care: I want to be able to peruse and browse, even see a few juicy, delicious pictures to whet my appetite.  Again, pictures are not hard, and the effort is worth it.  Right now, I can ONLY download the print PDF, which is just not as easy to look through on a screen or on a tiny phone screen.  The meny should be appetizing, easy-to-use, and ALSO offer a PDF download.

So, what can be done about it?

I present you, The NEW FIGO web presence (the Homepage anyway):

Click the picture above to see the 100% full size mock-up.

So, while I did not address any of the interior pages, you can already see what I am talking about.  This jives much better with FIGO’s brand.  It engages the user, reflects the restaurant, makes you hungry, and makes you want to go to FIGO!

So, just a re-cap of the  some of the changes.

1. First, we need to make the site feel warm, friendly, and exciting.  I did this by mimicking the lighting in the FIGO locations: a stucco Italian-style freco wall texture with a very warm splashed light on it.

2. Immediately, I focus the user on a vivid, close-up, delicious rotator picture of the food.  Next to this, I can see the active Twitter feed, with a BIG follow button, and a call-out to show me Specials.
Behind that, we have piles of dry pasta (Another decor element mimicked from the locations).  Immediately, we are establishing the character and personality behind the brand, so people are getting a very positive first experience with FIGO on the web.

3.  We got rid of that pale yellow and used the vivid orange color from the logo. The navigation is now on top, bigger and more bold.

4. Right below that, we use bold, classic-style call-outs to bring attention to the Story, Menu, and Locations (probably the 3 main things people will look for when they come to the site).

5. Below that, we have a cool feature I came up with to really engage the user: using the great tagline, “Be Yourself. Be FIGO,” we encourage interaction and engaging behavior by parsing Flickr for the Figo Pasta tag and returning a grid of all the AWESOME that ensues.  (To note, I designed the grid, but every picture in the mock-up is actually from a Flickr search of Figo Pasta.)  Now that is convincing.  How hard is it believe that this restaurant is great when I have dozens, even hundreds of pictures of proof!

6. Below that, we have a classic footer with omnipresent social media links.

Conclusion

So, does FIGO NEED a new website?
Well, it’s a loaded question.  I cannot pretend to know how well they are doing, but I am going to guess reasonably well, and it is good that FIGO has established a Facebook and Twitter account.
However, the current website is a really weak link in their otherwise impeccable brand.  It is an absolute fact that with a more professional, more engaging, more brand-centric website, FIGO would get EVEN more customers than they do now and potentially more repeat customers.  Right now, their website is effectively a dud: it just sits there and occasionally gives directions, but I doubt it turns decisions around or convinces new customers to come.  A website is an interactive experience and it has objectives.  Right now, FIGO is getting the basic, bare minimum of simple objectives when they could be leveraging their website as an effective asset in gaining more repeat customers, more new customers, and overall an even more complete and even better brand experience.

FIGO is great. I love going there, as my colleagues, employees, and friends do, too.  But I guarantee you, if the brand was more engaging and present to us on the web, we would be going there twice as much as we do now, and that’s lost sales.  I suspect we are not the only example.

There is always room to do something better and excellence is always worth it.