How do you inject new life into an established and well loved brand, and maintain its uniqueness and charm?

Accentuate and simplify the brands heuristics

With an understanding of why people love Housing Units, we could ensure others do the same.  We identified a number of key brand attributes that we could breathe new life into, and in doing so build up a suite of shortcuts, or brand heuristics, that allow people to get to know the brand.

These heuristics include the well known green colour, the wide range of products across multiple departments, the expert people on the shop floor, the Sale periods, the Christmas Grotto and the Restaurant and Cafe.  All these elements are familiar to most people as offerings of a department store. Therefore, our task was to use the familiarity bias, which is the preference of individuals to remain confined to what is familiar to them, to win new customers and reassure existing ones.

We took hold of every part of the brand, embedding a whole new brand design, tone of voice and way of celebrating their extremely passionate people.

We created a new brand positioning around the aspects of the brand that are associated with department stores, and added what gives Housing Units its distinctiveness – ‘The Home Department Store’ became the new strapline. 

By harnessing this simple positioning, the brand grew and developed into a celebration of each and every department, the customer experience and the passionate people behind the scenes and on the shop floor.

The new branding went live during the Winter Sale Preview Event in December 2017. Housing Units broke its daily in store sales record on the first day of the Preview Event and on the same day also experienced its biggest ever day of online sales.

The Preview Event, which lasted 4 days, saw a 3% increase in sales compared with 2016’s Preview Event with furniture sales alone up 16% year on year.