Cultural Experiences & Meaningful Brands
Case: Freson Bros. Prototype Store
Consultant Design Group: Shook Kelley (click on link for their case study and photos)
Client: Freson Bros (Alberta, Canada)
The right kinds of cultural research and strategic insight can lead clients to the most productive and profitable opportunities. For Freson Bros, this meant finding a unique position for a special grocery store organization in a crowded market of corporate heavyweight brands.
A lot of the best cultural branding emerges from listening. In this case that meant listening to the client and their internal culture. The Lovsin family that has owned and operated these stores for more than half a century are not academic-trained marketers and had never operated in a brand or customer-centric way. But they know how to tell stories, how to make great products, and how to create an authentic experience that instantly communicated feelings of hospitality, warmth and friendliness.
My goal was to help them translate these cultural values into a meaningful and branded store experience.
Challenge
Freson Bros. is a privately held, family-owned supermarket brand had 16 stores in mostly rural locations in the Canadian province of Alberta. They struggled to bring their store format and experience, successful in more rural areas, to the suburbs of and eventually into the city of Edmonton.
Approach & Methods
Research fed into development of Brand and Design Strategy. Shook Kelley designers have now produced three new stores, including a prototype, to reinvent the brand for these more competitive urban markets. Research methods included:
Ethnographic interviews
Internal culture analysis
Client workshops
On-site store visits
Competitor market analysis
Food culture trends analysis
Regional food culture research
From Strategy to Experience:
Research-based Insights connected the dots between what more urban Alberta customers were seeking in food culture, what was missing in the current marketplace of retailers, and what the Freson Bros. could authentically own and offer to customers.
The Freson Bros. strategy offers a genuine and culturally relevant identity for the brand. The direction is rooted in the Lovsin family’s values and beliefs, their Alberta heritage and their butcher traditions. This strategy, tied to contemporary food culture trends, combines a relevant point of view with a genuine family voice.
Three new stores were created by design partners at Shook Kelley (Los Angeles), including a prototype store in Stony Plain, Alberta (2013), and next evolutions of the prototype in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta (2018) and an urban location in Edmonton, Alberta (2020). While the majority of the chain’s stores had previously been located in smaller towns in Alberta, the new stores are located in and around Edmonton, a marketplace with heightened competition, heterogeneous cultural dynamics, and enormous growth opportunities.
The new store experiences highlight a handful of special and unique story-filled experiences that stand out as memorable. This is important for storytelling amid thousands of products, and urgent task-focused shopper mindsets.
Impact
The store is a cultural phenomena and social experience.
Not only has Freson Bros created a brand that their community identifies with, but the store itself has become a hangout space and dining destination. The seating areas feature long community tables crafted by a local carpenter from fallen trees in the Albertan woods, as well as a fireplace and booth seating. It’s a place to see and be seen, from weekend breakfast to weekday lunchtime. Freson Bros has set a new standard for everyday cultural expectations in Alberta.
Sales have exceeded projections and expectations. The buzz around the Freson Bros brand has transformed this rural Alberta chain into a prizeworthy destination for both foodie shoppers throughout the Edmonton area, as well as real estate developers looking to land an exciting tenant for the best new urban living projects.