Fork twirling spaghetti with Culinary Institute logo overlay.

 

Cooking Up Deals with the CIA

The Culinary Institute of America (a.k.a., the CIA) is more than just the world’s premier culinary college—they happen to be our neighbors, just up the road from Ashworth Creative in Hyde Park, NY. So it was perhaps inevitable that we would find each other and collaborate on some significant projects. Almost three years ago, Ashworth Creative began discussions with The Culinary Institute of America to find a new and creative way to re-market a collection of their consumer-facing cookbooks.

iMac mockup of CIA website to purchase cookbook in ebook format.

Digital Recipes are Hot, Hot, Hot

As anyone who has ever Googled a recipe can tell you, checking out recipes on tablets, mobile phones, and screens is a universal pastime. As part of our collaborative agreement, the CIA digitized eight of their most popular cookbooks. In turn, Ashworth Creative devised a marketing plan to showcase the cookbooks in digital and print form, sell them in clever bundles with discounts for bulk purchasing, and promote them through social media advertising and search engine marketing.

iPad mockups of 3 different pages of digital recipes

A Tasty Package for Passionate Cooks

The e-commerce website, ciacookbooksonline.com was designed by Ashworth Creative with Shopify and launched to capture the holiday gift-giving market. The look is stylish and engaging and the site offers terrific deals for the consumer. Consumers ate it up! Every few weeks, Ashworth refreshes the creative—developing recipe-based ads, tempting free-recipe-download opportunities, engaging repurposed video material, and new and clever ideas using the extraordinarily rich resources of The Culinary Institute of America. Now, the marketing mix is including e-newsletters that are also driving dramatic sales increases.

The Proof of the Pudding

So far, the results have been excellent. For the CIA, there’s a delicious return on their initial investment in creating the cookbooks. For Ashworth Creative, it’s helping a great client build an ongoing revenue stream. Ashworth also manages the helpline to ease any questions consumers have about the marketing process, which then informs any mid-stream technical enhancements.

iMac mockup of Culinary website with ebook "add to cart" shop page

Having Your Cake and Eating it

This partnership is a great example of how creative Ashworth can be in helping clients achieve their goals. By working on a project we believe in, we are all able to reap rewards.

We invite you to visit ciacookbooksonline.com. If you don’t have a cook in your life who’d love to access eight gorgeous, full-color e-cookbooks on their tablet, laptop, or mobile phone, we’ll be very surprised! How about the print editions? (See, it’s an offer too yummy to refuse!)

If Ashworth Creative can sell 1,000+ recipes and eight cookbooks for The Culinary Institute of America, imagine what we can do for your product. Call Eve Ashworth at 845-877-0410 or e-mail eve@ashworthcreative.com