Old Scratch Pizza

Clarissa Lowry is Marketing Manager at Old Scratch Pizza, where she focuses on brand building, digital marketing and customer engagement. A Certified Digital Marketing Professional, she brings experience in marketing strategy, community engagement and storytelling. Her work centers on building authentic customer connections while using digital channels, data and technology effectively.

Bringing Hospitality Into Brand Management

In restaurants, hospitality is one of our core values. Hospitality is customer-focused by nature, so it carries over easily into how I approach marketing and brand management. If we’re expected to take care of guests at the table, we should take the same care in every message we put in front of them.

Brand recognition matters a lot in pizza, which is a competitive and sometimes oversaturated category. Standing out takes a few things working together. First, our messaging focuses on what makes our concept and technique different and shows that we offer a dining solution for any occasion. Second, we build hype and a following around certain limited-time offers and signature menu items, so guests have something to look forward to and talk about. Third, and probably most important, we engage with the community beyond food.

When a brand is part of the community, guests start to connect it with more than a meal. They connect it with celebrations, family gatherings, local events and giving back. That builds a relationship a menu alone can’t.

Using Loyalty and Local Voices to Connect With Customers

The first is a strong loyalty pipeline. Our loyalty program is one of our biggest priorities because it captures guests who are already inclined to engage. Once they’re in the program, we can reach them directly through paid advertising, email, app notifications and exclusive offers. Our messaging reaches the people most likely to care about it, and they get more value from hearing from us.

“Clarissa Lowry is Marketing Manager at Old Scratch Pizza, where she focuses on brand building, digital marketing and customer engagement.”

The second is micro-influencer marketing. Small local creators are relatable, and their followers are dedicated and engaged. When a local creator shares an experience at one of our restaurants, it lends an authenticity to our social channels that polished brand content can’t always match. For a community-focused brand, that kind of voice matters.

Keeping Digital Marketing Human and Authentic

As more of the digital marketing space turns to AI, it can be harder to keep messaging authentic. Even without AI, it’s easy to lose sight of your audience online, where people start to look like reach, impressions and leads instead of individuals.

For us, the answer starts with a strong brand identity and voice. We work with content producers and staff who deeply understand our brand, and that helps keep our storytelling genuine no matter which channel or tool we’re using.

We also take our core values to heart: people first and genuine hospitality. Our product exists for our guests. We have feelings, frustrations and opinions, and so does our audience. We try to speak to them the way we’d want to be spoken to, honestly and authentically. Data and technology help us decide where and when to tell our story. They shouldn’t change who’s telling it.

Learning Through Experimentation

Don’t be afraid to fail. Testing a new approach and measuring the results is valuable even when the numbers aren’t outstanding. Every test teaches you something about what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

Brands that stop experimenting get stagnant, and their messaging does too. I would rather try something new, learn from it and adjust than keep repeating what worked a few years ago. Some of our best ideas came out of tests that didn’t go perfectly the first time.

Building a Digital Marketing Career Through Hands-On Experience

Get in there and try things out. You don’t need a big budget or a senior title to start learning. Google and Meta both offer free training courses and webinars that let you explore different areas of digital marketing, such as search, social advertising and analytics.

Hands-on experience builds confidence faster than anything else. Run a small campaign, look at the results and ask why they turned out the way they did. Stay curious, stay close to the people you’re marketing to, and remember that behind every metric is a real person.