STORMBRANDS Delivers Strategic Brand Platform For Despar Retail Group

UK based brand and design consultancy StormBrands, has partnered with Aspiag Service Srl, one of the consortium members of Despar Italia, to create a compelling new brand purpose, strategic brand platform, architecture and design system, to be deployed across its entire store portfolio and communications collateral.

Aspiag Service Srl, together with Despar Italy, has a strong heritage and rich brand assets including its evocative fir tree icon, which is well known and loved by consumers. However, this iconic heritage and the rich story of choice that sits at the heart of the business wasn’t being fully expressed. In addition, the brand didn’t have a design system in place to communicate its offer consistently and distinctively across its family of stores: Despar neighbourhood supermarkets, Eurospar supermarkets and Interspar hypermarkets.

StormBrand’s challenge was to craft an authentic and relatable brand story and brand world that united the Aspiag community whilst also celebrating the diverse offers of its stores and the choices of its customers.

The agency also focused on evolving the business’s perspective on value and price, shifting the conversation from ‘price driven’, to ‘value as a positive choice’ leveraging Despar’s heritage, community and the supportive nature of the business to empower customers to make easy brand decisions in a complex world full of choice.StormBrands audited and mapped Italian and International retailers to thoroughly understand the local consumer landscape and Aspiag’s role within it, whilst taking inspiration from wider global benchmarks. The agency approaches each new piece of work through the lens of its own purpose: “Energising brands to move mindsets, markets and culture.” In the case of Aspiag and consequently for Despar Italia, the team developed a unique platform, ‘The Value of Choice’ true to the business and ownable within the market. This platform added clarity to the commercial strategy and informed all brand assets. Renewed purpose was also brought to the iconic logo and colour palette, giving them room to shine from OOH right through to the in-store environment as well as online.

StormBrands has delivered a multi-channel communication strategy, TVC direction and shopper activation programme to support the new platform as well as successfully rolling out the new design system and assets to existing Aspiag agencies through onboarding and ongoing agency partnerships.

Duncan Kelly, StormBrands Design Director commented:

“By acting as a strategic partner, we were given the opportunity to make a meaningful change to Aspiag’s business that came from a powerful truth. Choice is an exciting concept, and one that the brand can truly own and celebrate through the value it adds to the lives of its communities and customers.”

He added:

“All through the process, and via close collaboration with the senior stakeholder team, we’ve been able to inspire a new creative direction for the brand and shape a new mindset. We’ve also elevated Despar, within Aspiag regions, into an international space without it losing its local roots. Every design decision we’ve made supports a creative vision of iconicity and authenticity and the business’s ambition of helping customers make the choices that matter to them, for generations to come.”

Marco Marchetti, Head of Communications at Despar added:

“‘The Value of Choice’ has flipped our organisation’s biggest challenge into its greatest strength. StormBrands have delivered on our two key KPIs of creating a design platform and system that are both easy to navigate and easy to produce. They’ve been able to give us an international perspective and ‘look and feel’ and completely change our brand approach.”