Truly Deeply/Madly

Spud­bar was founded in Mel­bourne in 2000, born out of a frus­tra­tion at the lack of a healthy, great tast­ing, healthy feed that was quick, con­ve­nient and value for money. It has been on a mis­sion from day one, to cre­ate a new cat­e­gory of food offer that fuses nat­ural good­ness and big flavours into the nutri­ent rich gem that is the steam­ing baked spud. The poten­tial of the brand was clear, the ques­tion was how to realise that great poten­tial by tak­ing the Spud­bar brand to the next level.

When we began work­ing with Spud­bar they had 9 stores around Aus­tralia and was strug­gling to own a space in the mar­ket com­pelling enough to grow the busi­ness to the next level.

We were engaged to give Spud­bar a com­plete brand over­haul. We con­ducted a brand audit to look at the Spud­bar brand from the inside out and a com­pre­hen­sive com­pe­ti­tion and mar­ket review to look at the brand from the out­side in. The more we immersed our­selves in the brand the more it became appar­ent that Spud­bar could greatly ben­e­fit from a new direc­tion. A direc­tion that was truly grounded in the hum­ble potato, and more deeply con­nected with a mar­ket need.

What Spud­bar needed most was a rea­son for being and that had to come from the brand up. To achieve this we immersed our­selves in their mar­ket seg­ment, gen­er­ated some clear qual­i­ta­tive mar­ket insights from cus­tomers, ex-customers and non-customers, and led a brand strat­egy re-think to pro­vide a clear vision for where the brand and its offer could most potently be posi­tioned for suc­cess in the market.

We devel­oped the Spud­bar brand char­ter, a roadmap defin­ing how the brand needed to act, feel, speak and look to deliver a 360 degree expe­ri­ence that deliv­ered on the newly defined brand propo­si­tion. We defined the dri­vers for the brand strat­egy as Nat­ural Good­ness, Sur­pris­ingly Deli­cious, Local Groove, Sassy and Easy. And we iden­ti­fied Spudbar’s brand per­son­al­ity as Real, Lively, Imag­i­na­tive, Pas­sion­ate and Engag­ing. These val­ues and per­son­al­ity attrib­utes were the dri­ving force behind build­ing the new look and feel. Spudbar’s brand image had to richly and evoca­tively reflect the brand’s propo­si­tion of local, authen­tic and a pur­veyor of potato heritage.

The key to devel­op­ing the Spud­bar brand iden­tity was unlock­ing the cues of the visual lan­guage of one-off local cafes. Whilst these cafes seem dis­parate and highly indi­vid­ual, when explored as a group there are many sim­i­lar­i­ties in the way they present them­selves to mar­ket, often dri­ven by a lim­ited bud­get. The lack of pol­ished design is a part of what iden­ti­fies and dif­fer­en­ti­ates these local, one-off cafes and restau­rants. An exam­ple is their menus, which are often hand writ­ten on black­boards, or tiles or paper stuck to the wall, they rarely include pho­tographs of the food. By unlock­ing the code of visual lan­guage for these high-loyalty, non-franchise food busi­nesses, we devel­oped the Spud­bar brand iden­tity to work in a sim­i­lar, non-cookie cut­ter manner.

The brand iden­tity design solu­tion included two defin­ing ele­ments that work together to drive the brand expe­ri­ence from a visual per­spec­tive. The first is to iden­tify each Spud­bar by its loca­tion, we changed the organ­i­sa­tional mind-set from own­ing mul­ti­ple stores, to hav­ing local unique store in mul­ti­ple loca­tions. The stores changed from being called ‘Spud­bar’, to ‘Rich­mond Spud­bar’ or ‘Hawthorn Spud­bar’, with a new empha­sis on the local iden­ti­fier. The sec­ond defin­ing ele­ment was the inte­gra­tion of local street art into the store envi­ron­ment. The brand iden­tity sys­tem we devel­oped inte­grated the art work of a well known and very tal­ented Mel­bourne paste-up artist. For each store a sig­na­ture piece of art is cre­ated, that piece is ‘pasted’ to a promi­nent wall in-store and becomes a fea­ture of the expe­ri­ence. The greater brand iden­tity also incor­po­rates a suite of ‘spud inspired’ illus­tra­tions from the same artist.

The most defin­ing visual ele­ments of the brands iden­tity are hand-made from the lino-print Spud­bar brand­marks, the store sig­nage and inte­ri­ors, the clip­board menus and a hand­crafted type­face, reflect­ing the D.I.Y nature of local cafes.

In design­ing the com­plete brand expe­ri­ence for Spud­bar we have devel­oped a suite of ele­ments includ­ing, cor­po­rate sta­tion­ary, take­away pack­ag­ing, in-store and take home menus, uni­forms, inter­nal and exter­nal sig­nage, web­site, mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral, in-store envi­ron­ments, fur­ni­ture selec­tion, Art Direc­tion of art­work and pho­tog­ra­phy and typography.

“The brand def­i­n­i­tion work and brand iden­tity design Truly Deeply devel­oped for our Spud­bar chain of healthy food stores has blown the lid on the poten­tial for our busi­ness. We believe what was pre­vi­ously a nine store fran­chise now has the mar­ket posi­tion­ing, store design and brand image to expand into a sig­nif­i­cant national net­work. As a return on busi­ness invest­ment I can’t rate the brand work Truly Deeply pro­duce more highly.”

Ant Mor­rel
Spud­bar Owner & National Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing & Sales

Spud­bar recently opened their first two branded and re-designed stores in Rich­mond and Hawthorn two inner sub­urbs of Mel­bourne and the results is a ‘dialled-up’ brand expe­ri­ence on all lev­els. Spud­bar has cre­ated a space that is invit­ing and com­fort­able, a place for locals and a place that is uniquely on-brand.

The strength and longterm equity of the Spud­bar brand will be dri­ven by the solid strate­gic frame­work that has been devel­oped. The strate­gic frame­work pro­vides the back­bone for the major­ity of deci­sions the busi­ness will make day-to-day.

Strat­egy is often seen as a sep­a­rate dis­ci­pline to design. For the past 10 years we have focused on the inte­gra­tion of strat­egy and design to deliver highly unique and effec­tive brand expe­ri­ences. Spud­bar demon­strates how these brand dis­ci­plines inter­weave to cre­ate a rich brand expe­ri­ence with lay­ers of mean­ing and per­son­al­ity, that con­nect with the mar­ket in a pow­er­ful way.

Since the launch sales have increased by 20% in month on month, store on store com­par­i­son and con­tinue to grow.

We would urge you to go down to the Rich­mond Spud­bar on Swan St or the Hawthorn Spud­bar on Glen­fer­rie Rd and soak up the atmosphere.

If you would like to know more about how com­bin­ing brand strat­egy and design can take your brand to a new level, give us a call and organ­ise a lunch date at one of the Spud­bar store, because the proof is in the Spuds.

 

 

Tags: Brand, Brand Agency, Brand Design, brand designer Melbourne, brand designers, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, brand-designers-Melbourne, Graphic Design Melbourne, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 9:30 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image, Creative, Experiences, Graphic Design Melbourne, Our Work, Thinking, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.