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RETAIL BETTER: STORE OF BRANDS VS. BRANDED STORE

December 6, 2022 by Steven Cohen – When we talk to clients about creating their strategy for their NTI, remodel, or concept store, we always ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be a branded store or a store of brands?”

It’s the first step to understanding what direction you need to go with your retail environment. A great example of a “Store of Brands” is 7-Eleven.

When you enter one of their stores, you see the house brands they promote from inside the store which include Big Gulp® and Slurpee®. As they roll out the Laredo Taco brand, which is fundamentally an in-house QSR, they’ve introduced another brand to their portfolio.

There are several examples of a branded store and two that immediately come to mind are Wawa and QuikTrip. Wawa has a very loyal customer base that knows the cadence of their promotions. They know the store’s lingo. What they don’t have to know are specific brand names of products in the store. Soft drinks and frozen drinks don’t have any special names. Wawa presents short-term seasonal menu items that are broadly named, and the Gobbler comes to mind. It’s a turkey dinner available as a bowl or a sandwich. It’s a menu item, not a brand.

QuikTrip has their QuikShake®, a milkshake that is made in-store with soft-serve ice cream. It’s also a menu item. But overall, the products in the store are not branded, and QuikTrip has robust base of loyal customers.

There you have it. The Branded Store or the Store of Brands. Both are good strategies. Develop a store that matches your strategy and tells your story.

Our Brand Story

GSP started as a printing company in1978. We found our niche supplying in-store signage for convenience stores when retailers guessed quantities they needed. This led to overage, waste and expense. To solve this, we developed software to guarantee on-time delivery of “the right size sign, to the right store, every time.”

In 2014, we started AccuStore with a dedicated team. As software helped drive our growth, we realized that new printing and fulfillment sites near customers could drive business and improve sustainability. We acquired companies that fit GSP’s technical excellence and superior customer service models.

First was Great Big Pictures in Madison, WI in 2015. They lead the field in large format printing and visual merchandising for iconic fashion retailers. Their standards for customer service include award-winning sustainability programs, and expertise to bolster retail environments services.

In 2020, GSP acquired Custom Color in Lenexa, KS. The company supplies printed graphics to leading retailers. Custom Color’s stellar quality in fabric printing also aligns with GSP’s values.

GSP provides branding and marketing services with a focus on site-specific execution to help transform our customers’ growth strategies into store-level success. We design retail environments to engage shoppers and provide superior customer experiences. AccuStore powers our retail marketing, execution and digital display technologies and ensures stores get only what they need. GSP is a forward-thinking company that’s here to serve retailers now, with a focus on their future.

GSP delivers graphics and digital marketing to over 75,000 retail locations. Our experts provide retail branding and marketing services, focused on site-specific execution. Our methods ensure stores get only the POP they need, at the lowest cost. Our Retail Environments team creates and deploys amazing, in-store shopping experiences.