Fake Brand, Real Software

Branding | Ad Design | Research

Mercatus is an independent eCommerce platform, providing a white-label experience for grocery retailers. Sales and marketing were struggling to represent the redeveloped platform, DXPro. The sales team jumped between customer sites during demos and needed something cohesive. Marketing was mashing product imagery together out of wireframes and photoshop.

The best solution was to make a fake grocer that looked and felt real. As soon as the new codebase was far enough along that the dev team would let us touch it, we sprang into action.

The Project

Brief

The fake grocer must be a blank slate for grocers to imagine how their brand would look on the Mercatus platform
For simplicity it will align with Mercatus colors and fonts
It must feel like a real grocery brand, without intruding on the visual territory of clients/prospects
It needs a private label product line to match customer use case

Deliverables

Brand guidelines
In-universe banner ads, blogs, and email campaigns
Suite of (fake) private label products
Fully branded production environment

The Process

Research

I closely examined customer and prospect websites and pulled old swipe files of private label grocery brands. Inspired by No Name and the URL of the pre-merger demo space, we chose to call it Shop(dot). It's what it says on the can.

Logo Exploration

The logo options were built with a very simple visual language.

It's the Tintin of logos. Hergé drew the backgrounds lushly and the characters sparingly, pushing all of his readers to imagine themselves there. In demos and marketing material, it needed to look grocery but be so invisible that our customer's eyes would slide right past the logo. At the same time, the banners, offers, and marketing copy needs to be detailed, specific and authentic.

In-universe Assets

Based on our target addressable market, I made a short brand guideline (PDF link), outlining the services, differentiators and size of shopDot. I created months worth of banners and ads for our fake grocer, separated by persona. To demonstrate how our customers can sell ad space on their eCommerce site I faked numerous CPG ads (not shown here).

Cross-team Implementation

To get the pretty logo and brand colors on the very first, very rough version of the testing site, I collaborated with the product team and operations. Product used the original figma designs to translate our "brand" colors onto the white-label site. Operations created the architecture of the site from the highly customizable widgets/layout managers, then trained me to update banners on my own. It was a small-scale version of onboarding a "real" retailer and a great dry-run.

This was happening on a testing site, so the codebase was still being written as we worked. The latest step has been to migrate Shop(dot) to the newest version of the code, and it now lives in a real tenant, just like our retailers will. The fake grocery store is helping Marketing understand our customer pain points and opportunities. The knowledge I've gained designing Shop(Dot) is being applied to ad copy and positioning, as well as speeding up product imagery production.

The Conclusion?

Shop(Dot) is an ongoing project. The most recent work completed is scheduling seasonal banners that change every three months. These seasonal banners change based on which ficticious customer is logged in, or not.

As the DXPro platform that Shop(dot) is built on develops and changes, we'll be adding more functionality and adapting the story our personas tells to enable the Sales team.

Results

Sales has a powerful new demonstration tool
Marketing has product imagery for the asking
Operations and Marketing collaborate closer than ever
Marketing has hands-on experience with the new platform