The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company

Re-branding a 150-year
old Supermarket Icon.

In 2008 and 2009, A&P sailed straight into the perfect storm: A faltering national economy and the company’s attempt to integrate the purchase of a regional competitor, PathMark. Sales and profits were down. Morale was at an historic low. The company’s research clearly indicated that multiple shifts in pricing strategy and the reality of higher shelf prices were causing customer defection.

In supermarkets, the name of the game is frequency of visit. Our challenge was to restore pricing credibility with customers—even though A&P was late to the party on price roll backs—so that shoppers would begin to trust the company’s pricing and put the store back on their considered list.

In this kind of retail environment, any significant price reduction can’t happen overnight. It needs to come in waves to protect top line sales and margin. So HEILBrice developed The Lower Price Project for A&P. It is positioned as the largest pricing initiative in The Company’s 150 year history. Broadcast and print creative for the effort features popular TV host and local native Kelly Ripa from Live with Regis and Kelly. This is by far the most comprehensive package we’ve put together in our over 22 years working with supermarkets. Every consumer touch point is included: Broadcast, digital, print and in-store from the parking lots all the way down to the pricing tags on the shelves.

The Los Angeles Clippers

Inviting a
Nation to Rise.

The 2009-10 season was a challenging one for the Los Angeles Clippers. Their season ended with an interim coach (subsequently fired), a 29-53 record, and an injured number one draft pick who still hadn’t stepped foot on the court during the regular season.

But while adversity causes some men to break, it causes others to break records.

So the Clippers front office went on the offensive to create momentum for the upcoming season. With a dedication to hiring the right leadership, making active moves in the free-agent market and draft, they did everything possible to move the ball club in the right direction for the 2010-11 season.

We took all of that positive action and used it to develop a killer integrated campaign called “RISE”. The effort includes television featuring the determination of Blake Griffin, beautifully designed and printed renewal brochures, and a variety of digital ads.

Nolet Spirits

A Shot At Excellence.

The Nolet Family, makers of Ketel One Vodka, has been creating best-in-class spirits for ten generations. To introduce Harlem, a new premium Kruiden Liqueur, they asked us to design an extensive package of marketing materials. The goal was to support the sales team, educate consumers and introduce this exciting new spirit to the real influencers – bartenders. Built around the theme, The World’s Best Tasting Shot, we created everything from bottle-neckers to brochures to a radical, custom-wrapped Hummer. Proost!

Lauren Conrad

Turning a Star
into a Brand.

In just a few short years, Lauren Conrad went from a teenager at Laguna Beach High School to the star of MTV's highest rated show ever, The Hills. But that's just the beginning for Lauren. She is also a two-time bestselling author and hard at work developing her clothing line for Kohl's, in addition to other projects on and off television.

HEILBrice worked closely with Lauren on the recently launched laurenconrad.com, an integrated, elegant and socially-oriented website featuring blog postings, message boards, photos, videos and more. Phase One also has some exclusive content that can't be found anywhere else.

Pick Up Stix

Wok’d Fresh
= Pick Up Stix.

Pick Up Stix, a chain of fast-casual restaurants, serves delicious Asian food that’s wok’d fresh when you order it. Their biggest competitor, Panda Express, cooks its food in advance and serves it from warming trays. That fact gave us a powerful competitive advantage and became the foundation for a series of direct mail pieces and point-of-sale signage designed to boost sales for this Southern California favorite.

The Orange County Register

Creating a New
Online Presence.

To say it's been a tough couple of years for the newspaper business would be the media understatement of the century.

Newspapers everywhere are struggling to figure out ways to leverage their content— their intellectual property —and not their delivery mechanism, newsprint. The Orange County Register website, www.ocregister.com is by far the most visited site in Orange County, California. The region is a top 20 market when split off from the LA DMA. The paper asked us to help them with a top-to-bottom reorganization of their web presence. 80% of site traffic was coming from other than the home page. This told us that the paper was not a trusted source of news, but rather a link on a search engine results page. Additionally, because of some cobbled together architecture and content management issues, the site could take up to 30 seconds to load.

HEILBrice performed exhaustive due diligence with a series of interviews and work sessions with all internal stakeholders, from editorial to marketing and sales. We also searched the globe for the best and most innovative examples of what content companies were doing. Our conclusion: The Register's goal should be to have a site facile and interesting enough to qualify to be the home page for everyone living in Orange County. The paper can't compete with global sources from a brand or content perspective on the big national and international stories. But importantly, it can completely dominate where it matters most: delivering relevant content for the neighborhoods that people live in. We call it hyper-local.

The resulting requirements, recommendations and front-end design includes an AJAX-enabled customization that encourages users to tailor the site to their individual liking. If you're a soccer mom, prep sports might be more important than the opinion section. If you're a developer, you are more interested in real estate and finance. The new ocregister.com allows customization and even the addition of RSS feeds from outside the site — a true portal. The architecture, design and html were delivered to the OCR development team for implementation in conjunction with a new content management system. Page views are up. Load time is down. Client satisfaction is high.

Marie Callender’s

Burgers & Pie.
OMG!

The economy has not been kind to the restaurant industry. As restaurants continue to fight for market share, Marie Callender’s was faced with finding new ways to entice customers not just to visit, but also to increase their average check.

Based on the popularity of their $7.99 Marie’s Original Burger Combo, we worked with Marie’s marketing team to up the ante... and introduce a new series of more “extreme” burgers. With a $8.99 price point, these amazing burgers become all the more irresistible because they are served with a slice of Marie Callender’s world famous Pie.

The television, in-store and print all celebrate this fabulous union!

Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau

Rolling out the
Red Carpet.

To boost tourism in Los Angeles this summer, we created a high-impact promotion that invites consumers to plan a summer-time visit to enjoy all the glamour and excitement of the city.

The centerpiece of the effort is the “Red Carpet Summer” micro-site. Where visitors can book a special hotel deal, find discounts to attractions and events, and learn more about everything new in the city.

While partnering with many of the city’s best hotels and most exciting new attractions, we focused on a few key “tent-pole” events to generate bookings:

• Universal Studios Hollywood and the new Tram Tour featuring an awesome 3-D King Kong.
• The 50th Anniversary of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
• A New “Mummies of the World” exhibit at the California Science Center.
• And of course the mainstays of a visit: L.A.’s great shopping, the beaches, restaurants and entertainment.

To drive traffic to the site, we produced a comprehensive digital effort with powerful banner ads on “entertainment” and “celebrity” driven sites like TMZ and Access Hollywood. Plus, Geo-targeted Search and a comprehensive social media strategy to stimulate additional engagement with the LA INC. and Facebook websites.