LeMarche

A supermarket has a marketing problem no other retailer has: its customers are already coming. People buy food every week whether or not anyone advertises. The question is never whether they will shop, it is which shop, and that decision is made on habit, proximity and the sense that this one is worth the extra few minutes.

That makes it a radius business. A clothing brand can sell to anyone; a supermarket can only sell to people who can get there and back with a full boot. Spending anything at all on an audience outside that radius is spending it on people who will never walk in.

It is also a business with nothing static to say. The stock changes weekly, the offers change weekly, and what is worth photographing today is gone on Thursday. Most retail social accounts die of this — they post the shopfront, then the logo, then nothing, because nobody worked out what the recurring thing to say actually is.

A logo built for the surfaces a supermarket actually has. Not a screen — a sign over a shopfront read from across a street, a carrier bag, a shelf label, a receipt, a delivery van. That range, from very large to very small and from full colour to a single ink, is the real brief, and a mark that only works at one size on a white background fails a grocery business within a week of opening.

An Instagram account with a reason to post. The recurring subject is the food and what it costs this week — what came in fresh, what is on offer, what to do with it — because that is the only content a shopper has a reason to check rather than scroll past. It gave the account a rhythm that did not depend on anyone having a clever idea on a Tuesday.

Paid social spent inside the radius. Advertising was aimed at the neighbourhoods that can realistically shop there, and timed to the days people plan a shop rather than spread flat across the month. For a supermarket the cheapest impression is not the useful one; the useful one is the person eight minutes away deciding where to go on a Thursday evening.

Identity and account were built together rather than in sequence, which for a business like this is the point. The logo, the way a price is set on a photograph and the tone of a caption are one thing to a customer — they either add up to a shop that feels well run, or they do not.