Branding : The Multichannel Shopper

How well do three food merchants cross channels?

Have you ever walked into a store and felt like you’d stepped into that company’s catalog? Or visited a familiar company’s Web site and intuitively known where to find what you need because the site’s organized just like its store across town? Regardless of channel, your experience is the same: You experience that brand.

Can browsing a catalog or clicking an e-mail compare to getting a free sample in the store? To find out, in the first of a three-part series we’ll present in Catalog Success throughout this year, we scrutinized the multichannel efforts of specialty food merchants Dean & DeLuca, Penzeys Spices and Godiva (none of which we’ve ever done business with professionally).

Dean & DeLuca
The Dean & DeLuca brand began in 1977, when Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca opened their first store in Manhattan. This legendary pair set out to capture the feeling of a turn-of-the-century food department. They’ve since expanded to more than 25 retail locations, including stores, cafés and wine rooms in the United States, Japan and even Dubai. We recently visited Dean & DeLuca’s store in Leawood, Kan.

The Store: The high ceiling, specialty service counters, gourmet sandwich deli, laden shelves and food displays create an old-world feel that encourages you to explore and shop. The store bustles with energy and activity, and strongly reinforces the company’s brand identity.

The Catalog: Dean & DeLuca’s October 2008 catalog features its signature white cover bleed with silhouette images of products. This white background intentionally reflects the design of D&D’s branded product labels. Cutout images dominate the catalog spreads and allow for minimal styling with a consistent look and feel. The propped images that reflect an old-world store display reinforce the brand well. A few propped images look like a stylized home table setting and seem strangely out of place. They don’t reinforce the brand.

The Web Site: The homepage of the Web site does a fair job of capturing the food-department feel of the brand, though at times the above-the-fold layout has a horsy feel that can be cluttered and makes you wonder where to click. Competing Flash components add to the confusion.

Scrolling down, however, reveals an organized, pictorial table of contents that reflects the catalog’s design and creates the feel that you’ve found the right place. Without being privy to site statistics, giving advice on how to clean up the homepage is tricky, but the above-the-fold presentation probably could be tightened up.

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