Taco Gifter by Taco Bell
Taco Gifter by Taco Bell is a digital gifting e-commerce platform where people can “gift a taco” to anybody for any reason at all. It’s available in the Taco Bell app, mobile browser, and desktop.
Development
What was initially “text a taco” turned into building an entirely new e-comm experience for Taco Bell’s digital platforms – from scratch. It was an effort across all departments over the course of over 20 months.
Design Process
Taco Gifter’s design captures the playful spirit of giving and receiving an unexpected taco gift, then blending it with Taco Bell’s iconic shapes and colors. We worked closely with the designers for a year fine tuning the brand system.
Designing the Gift Taco
A very important symbol within the design is the gift taco itself; it needed to be both recognizable as the Taco Bell taco shape while still being a properly wrapped gift. And it needed to be something fun and inviting.
Rounds of design workshops and many months later, the landed on a hero taco shape that captures the spirit of a true gift taco while being distinctly Taco Bell.
ENDLESS WRAPPER COMBINATIONS
One of the key parts of the gifting experience is finding the perfect wrapper for your gift so it became key part of the Taco Gifter design language. Each reason has it’s own wrapper and is customizable for future campaigns and reasons down the road.
REASONS TO GIFT HEADLINES
We wrote thousands of reasons to gift a taco.
CUSTOMIZING MESSAGES WITH GIFs
As part of the gifting experience, users can send a short message with a GIF attached to their recipient. While Taco Bell had already created hundreds of GIFs for their Twitter bot, we had the enormous task of categorizing and tagging all of them for this new platform.
LAUNCHING TACO GIFTER ON NATIONAL TACO DAY
October 4th, National Taco Day, was the ideal date to debut Taco Gifter because every body would be able to find different reasons to celebrate with a taco on this national holiday.
Teaser posts released on all platforms were seeded weeks before to build hype and interest for the big day.
10,000 FREE GIFT TACOS
The official launch was to give away 10,000 tacos to gift on the new platform - which were all claimed within the hour of the announcement.
INFLUENCERS
We also partnered with various influencers to promote Taco Gifter with their own customized reasons to gift GIF sets.
THE ENDLESS REASONS TO GIFT INSTAGRAM STORY
Lastly, to really drive home that a taco can be a gift for any reasons, we released a 100 Frame Instagram Story with 100 different reasons to gift a taco.
RESULTS
• An evergreen e-commerce platform that can be used throughout the year for quick hit promotions and campaign tie-ins.
• The highest e-commerce sales day in Taco Bell history.
• 78% increase in sales across all Taco Bell franchises on that day.
• Lots of Reddit trolls…(example see below)
