[ Case study ]
Each location's manager designed their own social posts in Canva with whatever fonts appealed that week. The group's promotions ranged from elegant to chaotic, and the marketing manager had become a full-time screenshot critic.
CLIENT a restaurant group (4 concepts) — FOCUS Build four mini-systems inside one rulebook
Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.
Across one city, a restaurant group runs four distinct concepts — a wine bar, a neighborhood trattoria, a burger counter, a late-night dessert spot — each with its own manager, its own regulars, and its own social feed. The group's central marketing function is one manager who coordinates menus, photography, and promotions across all four. Post velocity is genuinely high: fifteen to twenty promotional posts a week across locations, mostly made in Canva by whoever has a free hour, usually the manager on shift.
Each location's manager designed their own social posts in Canva with whatever fonts appealed that week. The group's promotions ranged from elegant to chaotic, and the marketing manager had become a full-time screenshot critic.
We proposed four mini-systems inside one rulebook: each concept gets its own template set — palette, type pairing, photo treatment — while one structural rulebook governs all four, so a post is unmistakably the group's and unmistakably the concept's. Templates are built for the five-minute edit: photos swap into frames, text into locked boxes, nothing else moves. The rulebook ships as a one-page guide written in manager language with real examples of violations, so enforcement happens at the point of posting by whoever posts, not through the marketing manager's critique loop.
Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:
Each concept got its own template set (colors, type pairings, photo treatment) sharing one structural rulebook — variety inside consistency.
Templates are fill-the-fields-and-post: photos swap into frames, text into locked boxes, nothing else moves.
A one-page 'don't' guide (no stretched logos, no new fonts, no clip art) written in manager language — enforcement became self-service.
Delivered by the experience pod — brand designer over 5 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.
Obstacle
The first template set launched to near-zero use until the rules were rewritten from the actual violations — one manager's clip-art post became the training example, and adoption started the week the examples landed.
Handled: We rebuilt the don't guide as annotated before-and-after pairs from real group posts, ran one fifteen-minute walkthrough per location, and usage tracked the examples, not the principles.
Obstacle
Photo quality varied wildly between locations — the wine bar had a photographer's portfolio while the burger counter's photos were taken under heat-lamp lighting by whoever was free.
Handled: We wrote a shot list per concept — angles, distance, lighting guidance a phone can follow — and the burger counter's photos became usable inside the frames without new equipment.
The headline: of the group's social posts on-system across a two-month audit — 100%, read from Monthly brand spot-checks. A second check: marketing manager's weekly design-critique time at −6 hrs.
The marketing manager got her week back — the screenshot-critique loop that consumed hours now happens at the point of posting, by managers checking their own work against examples she wrote. The group's feeds look related without looking identical, which was the entire brief. Managers defend the templates now, because the system made their posts look better than their improvisations did. Cross-concept promotions finally read as one group with four personalities, and the gift-card campaign shipped on-system across all four feeds in a single afternoon.
The result was read from Monthly brand spot-checks against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on marketing manager's weekly design-critique time. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.
What we would do differently
We would have built the 'don't' guide from the actual violations — the first template set was ignored until the rules were written in examples, not principles.
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