Tepperman’s Brand platform
Tepperman’s was founded in 1923 by Nate Tepperman in Windsor, ON and is still run by family today. It operates as a regional home furnishings chain made up of retail stores and outlets selling furniture, bedding, electronics, and appliances to consumers in South-Western Ontario. They primarily compete with big box stores like the Brick and Leon’s as well other specialty providers in electronics (Best Buy) and bedding (Sleep Country).
Industry
— Retail
— Consumer goods
Branding to
— Articulate value
— Become known
— Conquer new markets
Services
— Brand & value proposition strategy
— Advertising & promotion
— Brand identity & visual systems
The Situation
Like most industries disrupted by digital, home furnishings is no exception, if anything the pandemic has accelerated this transformation with powerful platforms like Wayfair and Amazon taking share from the brick & mortar furniture and electronics retailers. Product differentiation is difficult in this category because essentially, they all sell similar brands with hard to discern levels of product quality. As a result, price, credit, and in-store experience (in-person and online) become the main differentiators.
Given Tepperman’s store size and limited geographical coverage, makes it more difficult to compete with their bigger, better funded competitors for brand awareness, online experience, and product inventory. We worked with the brand to go through an extensive strategic review and customer journey exercise which led to the need for a new brand creative platform that better differentiated the brand while clearly articulating Tepperman’s unique value.
Human catalyst
Home owners have a mental list of the things we would like to change and eventually those things get under their skin and just need to be changed or fixed so they can feel better about their home.
The Solution
Yield developed an insightful and irreverent creative platform based on the tagline – “Tepperman’s – Get home happy”. The idea uses insightful scenarios of how people are unhappy about their home and how Tepperman’s was able to make them “Home happy”. The campaign idea leveraged the Tepperman’s “A” graphic from their logo as a wayfinding device that led the consumer on a journey of discovering how they could get home happy. This device was used in store as a merchandising tool, as a pointer to promotions and price-points in ads as well as coming to life in animation as the path to or suggestions for Tepperman’s Home happy solutions.
Our new value proposition messaging focused on the local nature of the brand, higher quality products at better price points, in-house financing so consumers could get home happy sooner and highly trained home happy experts that weren’t high pressure salespeople but knowledge folks that were genuinely interested in helping customers get home happy.
Our creative platform solution was also cost effective to execute by utilizing the store environment as the backdrop for visuals highly showcasing the warm and more intimate nature of the shopping experience. Additionally no on camera talent was need because video/commercials used a POV shooting approach along with personifying the “A” as the brand solution.
Comprehensive guideline were creative to detail how the new platform would be used across all paid and owned marketing channels to enable a more consistent and integrated presentation of the brand.
The Yield
The new platform was overwhelming liked and approved by the owners and there are significant marketing investments planned for 2024 to rollout the new platform through a set of brand video and new TV commercials.