"Marketing News" a publication of the American Marketing Association had an interesting story on a small family business that had begun in 1915 in Manhattan's Upper East Side, by the Obsatz family. Butterfield Market which started out as a grocery store, when grocery stores were much smaller than they are today, and quickly gained a reputation as providing wonderful service and exceptionally high quality products.
In 1970 the latest member of the team came on board, Evan Obsatz, who realized the potential of the a small business with a sterling reputation to expand into other areas. He also realized that the scattered brand didn't provide customers with a unified impression of what Butterfield Market really stood for. He wanted their little store to communicate the look and feel of a exclusive, high quality experience. His first steps were to improve the layout of the store and changed the exterior of the building to better fit the type of quality products and services that customers had come to expect. Over the years they also expanded their product breadth by adding prepared foods and catering services.
Then Evan realized that the brand image that they were projecting was still somewhat disjointed and "informal" because there were a number of different looks on the company's various supplemental products such as grocery bags, boxes, letterhead, logo, website even the sign on the storefront. Faced with a great deal of reluctance to spend money on making a more consistent look and feel for the store, Evan agreed to hire an inexpensive New York design company (if you believe there is such a thing!) to create a unified brand across everything that was marked as Butterfield Market.
Unfortunately nobody was happy with the result - because it didn't really capture the essence of the store and it's long history of quality. "We tried doing it on the cheap and we got what we paid for" says Evan. After a taste of what a common brand might look like, even the elder members of the family were a little bit more open to the idea of getting a getting a real brand image created. So this time Evan asked the owners of companies who's branding he liked, and got the names of a couple of brand and image companies. Eventually he found a brand and design house to help him develop the perfect look to represent what Butterfield Market was really all about.
The branding and design house came up with two design options, one of which was greatly appreciated by the family and was eventually incorporated into boxes, shopping bags, uniforms and store vans and are currently working on a new website. The response has been wonderful, from both the customers as well as all of the family members who can see the benefits of having a consistent image. "We pride ourselves on quality and on customer satisfaction and on history, and now it's all in the brand".
Consistent branding probably isn't as critical in all businesses, but for this high-end specialty grocery store it was probably more beneficial for the clientele of this type of a business. Now Butterfield Market has a solid identity across their entire business and a consistent image that can more easily be leveraged to other locations and now they are considering expanding out to additional locations. Their new brand image should help to communicate their emphasis on quality as they venture beyond their initial starting place.
Chris Hawkes
