When the sign changes, do customers stay?
- Client
- Large grocery retail group
- Topic
- Brand perception, consumer behavior and expansion
- Method
- Quantitative survey + focus groups
Changing a store’s sign takes a weekend. Finding out whether customers will keep coming through the door takes longer, and getting it wrong is costly.
A large retail group was about to replace a well-known store brand in the region with another brand it owned. Visual identity, communication and how to manage the transition were still to be decided. But first, there was a question no one inside the company could answer with confidence:
Were customers loyal to the brand or to the store?
The difference changes everything. If customers were attached to the name, the transition would take a major effort to transfer that emotional bond. If they were attached to the experience, the risk lay in changing what worked, not the sign.
Measure the size, understand the reason
Checon split the study into two moves.
- 1Quantitative survey
First, a quantitative survey of local shoppers measured what could be measured: brand awareness, shopping habits and frequency, attribute ratings and whether people intended to change their behavior after the switch.
- 2Focus groups
Then focus groups with different shopper profiles explored what numbers can’t reach: feelings, worries, expectations and the spontaneous associations each brand triggered.
The numbers showed the size of each reaction. The conversations showed why it happened.
What came up
- 01Loyalty was to the store, not the name.
People felt familiar with, even fond of, the current brand, but what brought them back was convenience, location, product range, quality, service and promotions.
- 02Some attributes were untouchable.
The study identified what shoppers considered essential, the things that would need to survive the rebrand to avoid backlash.
- 03The same change had two meanings.
To some shoppers, the new brand promised improvement. To others, it threatened a routine that already worked just fine.
What the client took to the decision
The group came away with a clear map: which messages to reinforce, which parts of the experience to protect at all costs and which shopper profiles needed a different approach.
The strategy shifted from protecting the name over the door to protecting what kept customers coming back.