Of all the hazards involved in a job in advertising—say, depression brought on by demanding clients, or repetitive strain injury, or perhaps cirrhosis of the liver—it’s usually not necessary to wear the protective gear of a construction worker. But when Chris Staples finally saw his work for the new FreshCo grocery store coming to life last year, he had a hard hat on and caution in his eyes, as the sounds of hammers, saws and drills buzzed around him.

That’s because he and Vancouver-based Rethink Communications were straying far outside the usual domain of an ad agency. And as he walked through a mock store created in Orangeville, ON, that was built to test the look and feel of the new Sobeys-owned discount grocery player (which now has 59 stores in Ontario), the hard-hatted Staples took in the location’s entire graphic vocabulary that his company produced, from the in-store signage, to the private label packaging, grocery bags, gift cards and even staff uniforms.

“Typically, a client will ask you for a name and a logo and a few brochures,” says Staples, partner at Rethink. “The work rarely gets into the physical world of store design—and definitely not into things like uniforms.”

But there were bumps along the way, as Rethink navigated that physical world.

“One of the key parts of the FreshCo brand is this really bright, almost fluorescent green colour,” notes Staples. “It’s a tricky thing: if you go too fluorescent it can look like a used-car lot. You have to get it just right, and lighting really affects how colour looks in a store, so there were a lot of discussions: is the colour exactly right? Does the lighting need to change? We repainted the test store a couple of times.”

If that’s an unfamiliar challenge for an ad house, agencies across Canada are facing a lot of them as they seek to flex their creative muscles and help out their own bottom line by taking greater roles in shepherding clients’ brands. Some, like Rethink, Toronto-based Juniper Park, and Montreal’s Sid Lee, are articulating brands in physical space through store design; others like Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) Canada are sometimes moving away from pure advertising in favour of creating new ways for their clients to offer value to consumers.

Read the full article in Strategy Magazine.

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