Putting a place name next to a store logo may be stating the obvious and might even cause shoppers to feel manipulated.   

Putting a place name next to a store logo may be stating the obvious and might even cause shoppers to feel manipulated.   

Who knows when it started, but the first time your correspondent can remember anything of the kind happening was in Cheltenham a few years ago. Back then, Vodafone opened a shop in the middle of the town which bore the legend “Vodafone Cheltenham”. This was vaunted as something of a departure and along with sundry in-store pictures of ye olde Cheltenham, it was billed as an attempt to forge links with the local community.

Today, take a walk along London’s Liverpool Road in Islington, and there’s a branch of Londis. More accurately, it’s named “Londis Islington”. Now perhaps head down to Old Street and take a look at the whizzy new Argos close to ‘Silicon Roundabout’. This one has a sign below the Argos logo that shouts “Hello Old Street”. It would appear that in just a few years retailers have adopted wholesale the policy of yoking places to store names in the belief that this somehow makes them more attractive to shoppers.

But hold on. Most people wandering along either Old Street or Liverpool Road will have a pretty good idea of where they are and maybe putting the name of a district in close proximity to a store logo does little other than keep sign-makers in clover.

When quizzed, most retailers will tell you that what has been done is about giving shoppers a “sense of location”, which does sound a mite woolly and there is a high degree of probability that it will not serve as a ‘come shop me’ enticement.

In fairness, if done properly, using a location’s heritage as a way of creating identity for a store may work. In Wandsworth, there is a large Sainsbury’s that has a graphic along the front of the store charting the course of the nearby river Wandle and the landmarks along its banks. This is genuinely interesting and might actually work in terms of adding value to the store and the way in which it is perceived. Just putting an area’s name next to a logo, however, looks increasingly like an exercise in big corporate cynicism.

Most of the time, most shoppers will ignore this kind of blandishment and perhaps it might be better not to have it at all. The best store marketing should not feel manipulative.