The Peacock Pantry is one of those fantastic businesses that set up as a result of identifying a gap in the market. In this case, a love of unusual or specialist food ingredients and the difficulties of sourcing them provided a keen home cook with the desire to create an online retail business aimed at like-minded people.
Having established the business in late 2012, the owner approached me to review how The Peacock Pantry was marketed and help take it to the next level. Straightaway, I spotted two fairly obvious marketing issues:
The existing brand colours had no foodie values
The colour palette had derived from the colours of peacock feathers, but blue feels very cold – not what you would associate with food and cooking – and no one eats blue food (except for blue Smarties, perhaps!).
The strapline was misleading for customers. The word ‘delicatessen’ suggested fresh food, but all of the products on offer were dry ingredients.
Whilst the experience of unpicking a brand can be hard for clients, it’s good to explore all the different facets – the simplest tweak or change can make all the difference. In this case, we didn’t have to go all the way back to the drawing board. Instead we explored adopting new brand colours that are more foodie which was a relatively quick win. And some simple online research to understand the language of the target audience and how other food businesses talk to their customers quickly showed that the introduction of a new strapline would be far more effective.
A simple change of wording immediately identifies the purpose of the business and who it’s for – anyone discovering the website for the first time will quickly understand that it’s for people who love to cook gourmet meals and enjoy using specialist and high quality ingredients.
Our attention then turned to the website design and content…
With that piece of work complete we could then turn attention to the look and feel of the website.
Naturally, the new brand colour palette was applied to create an altogether more warm and welcoming online environment, complete with quality photography to provide inspiration. From a rather cool and sterile site, The Peacock Pantry now promises the excitement of discovering wonderful ingredients and gift ideas.
The marketing plan we jointly developed went much further than just the brand identity and website but it was the strong foundations we needed to create to help the business be successful in the competitive online ecommerce world. Even if you have a niche or spot a potential ‘gap’ in the market, you still need to brand and communicate your message correctly for your ideal customers, and also ensure they find you online. But that is another blog post!
I really enjoyed working with my client on this project and am delighted to report that since the new brand and website launched, my client’s sales have increased significantly.
If you think your own brand, website or customer communications would benefit from a marketing review, do get in touch.