A Tasty Rebrand

Background
The Forks is an expanse of historic riverside property in the heart of downtown Winnipeg, attracting nearly four million visitors each year. Within The Forks, The Forks Market offers a totally unique shopping experience where local residents can find everything from fresh produce, meats, wine and flowers to unique artisan gifts. For the last several years, The Forks Market marketing has promoted a “Fresh Specialty Brand”. Recently, the organization questioned the efficacy of this position and its resonance with its core audience. And more importantly, begun to ask the question of who the actual core audience is.

Objectives
The Forks Market came to Fusion to find the audience with the greatest opportunity for growth. They needed to assess their current and desired brand positioning against the needs and wants of the current target audience and retail mix. They would then target the key audience by developing a brand position, marketing plan, communications strategy, and revitalized look and feel. The main objective was to create top of mind awareness for The Forks Market shoppers.

Solution
After discussions with key Forks Market stakeholders and a thorough review of their website and facility, we identified the brand challenges and opportunities. These served as the basis for developing the research objectives and methodologies. The primary brand challenge was that the primary target audience was not well defined, affecting marketing messaging, channels and tactics, and the retail mix. Fusion conducted research including self-administered shoppers surveys and focus groups to better understand The Forks Market’s primary target audiences and find out what would entice them to shop there. We wanted to test the assumption that near-market residents may in fact be our core target audience and their perceptions of The Forks Market. The research provided a demographic profile of The Forks Market shopper and helped obtain unaided overall perceptions, positive and negative, of The Forks Market. In identifying the strengths and weaknesses of past strategies, we could discuss conceptual brand approaches geared toward encouraging increased patronage.

Results
Fusion created an extensive marketing and communications plan for The Forks Market, recommending they primarily target the near market residents. Strategies were identified for increasing merchant buy-in for the brand position and we completely revised the previous mass media marketing strategy to focus on the near market target group and ‘in market’ shopping experience. The new brand look and feel was launched to coincide with the 20th anniversary celebrations at the Market. To target the predominantly female audience as well as capture the experience of being in The Forks Market, Fusion chose to use natural looking textures and patterns in the materials. The rooster graphic was created to convey the fact that The Forks was promoting “early bird” specials as well as to add to the natural, down-home feel of the campaign.