Yum Yum Cha Group
Three brands. One operating playbook. Two national awards in a single year.
A restaurant doesn't need to advertise. It needs to be the place people who already have an audience naturally talk about.
01 The Group
Yum Yum Cha isn't a restaurant. It's a restaurant group — three distinct brands under one operator, each a different cuisine, each with its own room and audience.
The marketing problem when you run three brands: you can't speak in one voice. Each has its own audience, its own dish hero, its own night-out occasion. We treated them as three independent brand assignments under a single retainer — share the calendar, share the creator pool, but never share the voice.
02 The Awards Year
2023 was the year the group's positioning paid off in industry validation.
Two prestigious panels — Times Food Awards and UNLIMIT (zeezest) — recognised the group across two cuisines. Casual Italian and Casual Asian, both Delhi. Plus a national-best for Pan-Asian. Awards aren't earned overnight; they're earned in the year of small consistent moves before the panel meets. We were running social, PR and the deal-flow in the lead-up.
03 The Talent Activation
Awards do half the work. Talent activation does the other half. We engineered a moment where Ishant Sharma gave the YYC brands a shoutout on a Delhi Capitals podcast — earned media inside cricket-fan attention, the highest-trust channel for the audience the group's premium positioning was after.
This is the cross-pollination thesis behind 98: an exclusive talent contract isn't a single-property campaign asset. It's a relationship that opens doors for every other client on the book. Ishant didn't get a brief; he got a recommendation he was happy to make.
04 The Playbook
If you operate a multi-brand restaurant group, here's how we ran YYC — replicable for any operator with three or more sister brands.
One retainer, three voices. Don't merge the social pages. Each brand keeps its own handle, its own grid aesthetic, its own dish vocabulary. The retainer is shared; the voice is not.
Share the creator pool. A food blogger who liked TBSP's burrata is a warm lead for Pot Pot's bao and Wheaty's sourdough. We logged every creator visit centrally so the next round was 30% cheaper to coordinate. @shabostoc, for example, posted across all three brands inside a single quarter — the trust travelled with them.
Stack the calendar. Run launches and seasonal pushes across brands so press conversations stay current — but never compete with each other in the same week.
Position for awards from day one. Industry recognition is a cumulative argument. Document everything; the panel will read its way back through 12 months of work when nominations open.
Cross-pollinate talent. A talent contract held by the agency is leverage for every brand client on the book — don't wall it off to the brand that's paying the talent fee.
05 The Roster
The shared creator pool, in practice. Each name below posted to their own audience, in their own voice, tagged to the brand's own handle — no scripted captions, no paid disclosures.
"The jumbo prawns are a great option for sea food lovers. Juicy, full of flavours and baked to perfection." — @jhalli_bypriasethi · TBSP
"Pot pot makes me happy happy." — @ishitaaroraaa · Pot Pot
"What's better than a Lotus Biscoff Croissant from @wheaty.in on Croissant Day." — @raneechopra · Wheaty
06 The Receipts
The 2023 awards are still in the group's marketing copy. The recommendation engine — creators who first visited TBSP and now bring their friends to Pot Pot, talent shoutouts that opened doors with reviewers — is still compounding. The retainer ended; the awareness didn't.
The verified roster
@shabostoc@nanditamiglani@ningladheer@soumyapuri
Sourcing. This is the case record as published in Ninety-Eight’s archive; the same data renders the case file on the landing page, so the two cannot disagree. Reach is combined follower reach — the sum of the follower counts of the handles that posted — not impressions, not views.