One industry.Different brands.
Value created for the team
Gave each venue material that argues its own case, so the group's brands stop competing for the same customer with the same message.
Achievement
Turned one shared events kit into three venue-specific propositions, each leading with its own occasion fit.
On Day 1 I visited Chicco, Il Toro, Kulto and Cenzo in a single day. Same group, same city, same category — and almost nothing transferable between them. That day set up a question I kept answering for the next seven weeks.
Observation is not analysis.
Saying Chicco is approachable and Cenzo is premium describes the rooms. The useful work is asking what expectation each room creates, what the marketing therefore has to do, and what breaks if it gets it wrong.
Where the analysis was tested
The brand differences stopped being an observation exercise in Week 5, when I built an events kit for Humo, Chicco and Il Toro. I could not describe three venues in one voice: Humo's Spanish-Japanese, chef-led identity with roughly 40 seats and a six-seat chef's table, Chicco's relaxed handmade-pasta setting for birthdays and team meals, and Il Toro's woodfire room built for long-table and corporate dinners. Each needed its own reason to be chosen.
The tension inside a restaurant group
Consistent, faster to produce and easier to keep to a standard. It also makes four distinct concepts look like four branches of the same restaurant, which removes the reason to choose one over another for a specific occasion.
Sharper positioning per venue, but more production time, more approvals and a higher risk of the group losing any shared sense of quality.
What I ended up recommending in practice was shared production standards with brand-specific execution: the same technical quality bar, different pacing, tone, lighting and subject matter. Consistency does not mean identical.
Four brands — observation, expectation, decision, risk
Chicco
- The most affordable of the group, brightly lit rather than dim, attracting students, families and younger working adults for casual lunches and everyday dining.
- Brightness and price set an expectation of ease. Customers come to Chicco when they do not want an occasion — the decision is low-stakes and often last-minute.
- Content should be bright, fast and human, the tone warm and casual, and handmade pasta framed as everyday quality rather than as a luxury. On TikTok, people work better as the entry point than plated dishes.
- Over-polishing makes Chicco look expensive. If the content promises an occasion, a customer arriving for a relaxed weekday lunch feels the restaurant did not match its own advertising — and the group already has venues for occasions.
Il Toro
- The open-flame woodfire grill is noticeable before any food arrives — the aroma carries across the room and builds anticipation on the way to the table.
- The anticipation is part of what the customer is buying. The experience begins at the door rather than at the first course, and it is not something a photograph of a finished plate can convey.
- Film fire, smoke, sound and movement, not just the plate. Warmer light and slower pacing. For events, the grill becomes the centrepiece of long-table and chef-led dinners rather than a detail in the description.
- Bright, flat, dish-only content removes the exact thing that differentiates Il Toro and reduces it to another grill restaurant — competing on price and menu instead of on atmosphere.
Kulto
- Seen during renovation rather than service: layout decisions, operational flow and the physical build of the customer journey before a single guest arrived.
- Positioning is partly fixed by the room. Where people sit, how they move and what the space is lit for decide what the brand can credibly claim once it opens.
- Marketing should follow the space rather than lead it. Content built around craft and interior identity will be defensible; a promise the layout cannot support will not be.
- Marketing a concept the room does not deliver creates a gap the customer discovers in person — the most expensive place for a brand to be found out.
Cenzo
- Experienced as a customer would: seated, paced through courses that were introduced properly, from octopus with white bean purée to baked sea bass with yuzu kosho.
- The pacing and the introduction of each dish are the product as much as the food. Customers are paying for time, attention and a sense of occasion.
- Slower edits, cleaner transitions, refined tone. Rewards should be recognition, priority or exclusivity — never a visible discount, which is a different promise entirely.
- Discount-led or fast, casual content tells customers the restaurant needs volume. Once a premium venue is understood as good value, the original price is harder to justify.
Evidence from the internship
The specific moments this case study is built on.
Walking in, the smell of the open-flame woodfire grill reached me before I saw any food.
I noted it as atmosphere — a nice detail for a caption.
It is not a detail, it is the product. The grill builds anticipation before the first course, which means Il Toro's marketing has to sell heat, aroma and anticipation rather than the plated dish alone. A restaurant is sold through more than one sense.
Kulto was closed for renovation, so instead of a dining experience I saw layout decisions, service flow and construction.
I assumed there was nothing to learn from a restaurant I could not eat in.
Positioning is partly built before opening. Where a bar sits, how guests move, what the room is lit for — those decide what the brand can credibly claim later. Marketing inherits decisions made by a floor plan.
I wrote social captions and WhatsApp copy for different venues in the same sitting.
I wrote in one confident 'brand voice' and adjusted only the dish names.
Read back-to-back, the copy proved the venues were interchangeable, which they are not. A warm, casual line suits Chicco; the same line under Cenzo undercuts the refinement people are paying for. Tone is part of the price signal.
I had to present Humo, Chicco and Il Toro side by side for private dining and group bookings, with capacities, spaces and event types.
I started by making the three sections symmetrical, because it looked cleaner and was faster to build.
Symmetry hid the differences a customer is actually choosing between. Someone planning a client dinner and someone planning a birthday need different information first. I restructured around occasion fit rather than a uniform template.
The trade-off
What pulled against what
Efficiency and consistency for the marketing team versus clarity and distinctiveness for the customer.
Why the obvious answer was not enough
The venues attract different people for different occasions at different price points. A tactic that suits a high-frequency casual restaurant can weaken a venue that sells occasion and atmosphere.
Why I chose this approach
Keep one production and quality standard across the group, and let tone, pacing, lighting and subject matter differ per brand — including in the events kit, where each venue leads with a different reason to be chosen.
Going deeper
Risk of getting it wrong
The failure is rarely that the content looks bad. It is that the content sets an expectation the room cannot meet. Over-polished content for a casual venue makes the price feel high; casual content for a premium venue makes the price feel unjustified. In both cases the disappointment happens after the customer has already paid.
What I now check before producing anything
Who is this venue for, what occasion is it being chosen for, and what would this piece make someone expect when they walk in? If I cannot answer the third question, the content is not ready regardless of how it looks.
What I saw
Find the approach that works best for one venue and roll it out across the group.
Why it mattered commercially
The venues attract different people for different occasions at different price points. A tactic that suits a high-frequency casual restaurant can weaken a venue that sells occasion and atmosphere.
What changed in how I workProposed next test
I would test the assumption directly — compare enquiry types each venue actually receives against the occasions we position it for, and see where perception and intention diverge.
What I contributed
Gave each venue material that argues its own case, so the group's brands stop competing for the same customer with the same message.
I produced brand-specific content, captions and an events kit covering Humo, Chicco and Il Toro, structured so that each venue leads with its own occasion fit — venue, capacity, atmosphere and experience — rather than a shared template.
Decision rules I would carry forward
No asset is produced for a venue until a one-page positioning note — audience, occasion, tone, what we never show — exists for it.
Write the note for all four venues, then ask a team member to match unlabelled captions to venues; anything below full accuracy means the notes are not sharp enough.
Layout decisions in multi-brand documents are approved as positioning decisions, before design starts.
Present two structures for the next events kit — symmetrical versus differentiated — and ask each venue's manager which one they would send a real enquiry.
Event material uses event-specific photography of the actual occasion, never generic interior shots.
Shoot one real private event per venue and A/B the enquiry response against the current kit over a full quarter.
Check every piece against the venue's positioning note before it is published, and treat any exception as a deliberate decision rather than a shortcut.