Cafe of the Year

NZ Café of the Year is a wholly owned ICG property – a prestigious competition that we’ve been running since 2012. Under the banner of foodie excellence and fierce competition, we celebrate New Zealand’s cafes and the great meals, drinks and socialisation they provide to all of us. Each year we develop and manage the entire competition, which runs between August and February. This includes multiple design and communication elements to support the key phases of café sign up, voting, judging, and the final awards event. With hundreds of cafés entering each year, we utilise our marketing automation suite DO-IT to personalise our competition packs and communication with cafés. This includes thousands of pieces of point of sale and other promotional elements that are distributed right across the country. There’s a constant stream of communications being produced and managed – including the ongoing EDM programme sent our to the entrants, conversing with the (rather vocal) café-going community on social media, and sharing the judging process and results. After the judges have put down their cutlery and completed their scoring cards, it all culminates in an awards night where the champion of Kiwi cafés is crowned.