THE CLIENT | Spartan Nash
When the Nash brothers opened a small candy and tobacco store in 1885, they probably had no idea that their small company would become a nationwide success more than 100 years later. And most likely Spartan Stores, a wholesale food group formed in 1917, was not thinking of a nationwide presence. But in 2013 the two companies merged, forming SpartanNash, a food solutions company that delivers the ingredients for a better life through customer-focused innovation. Headquartered in West Michigan, SpartanNash has worked hard to pursue its vision to be a best-in-class business that feels local, and where relationships matter. Now a Fortune 400 company and the fifth-largest food distributor in the United States, SpartanNash continues to build on its history of innovation that serves its customers in the most local way possible.
CLIENT CHALLENGES | Wanting to Grow Their Competitive Advantage
As a growing food solutions company, this wholesale food distributor needed to compete for local grocery chain business. They were already working with lots of grocery retailers across the U.S., and to grow their grocery client base, they incentivized businesses to work with them by providing complimentary websites for each location. Each location would need to represent the local market to establish a community connection. But they needed someone to build and host the websites, and a web-based application to manage them. Not long after the merger of the two companies, the leadership team reached out to Cazarin in 2013 to embark on its journey to not only grow supplier partnerships with local grocery chains, but to do so in a way that showed their commitment to local needs and interests.
THE IMPACT | The Real Results
SpartanNash was utilizing their internal marketing department for promotional campaigns and relying on the Cazarin team for the development of 30 high-performing websites. Once the website was launched, SpartanNash began to see:
Increase in website traffic
Increase in sales
Increase in local partners
Through corporate transitions and economic cycles alike, the SpartanNash web presence has been reliably built and hosted to support their local needs.
THE CAZARIN APPROACH | Strengthening Communities With Consistency
During the discovery meeting with the SpartanNash team, Cazarin began to see that this was a company that puts relationships first, within their company and throughout their communities. While they were already implementing marketing and promotional strategies internally, they were relying on Cazarin for the development of 30 websites to represent their nationwide communities. When we presented our website development plan along with our storytelling approach, the team at SpartanNash was ready to get started. As a result, we immediately began a web design and layout that was consistent for each location, which allowed customization designed to nurture relationships within each community.
THE OUTCOME | Grocery Supplier Competes By Going Digital
For over ten years, we have supported the custom-developed, sophisticated marketing portal for SpartanNash—OwnBrands—which holds the logos and brand assets for their brand and grocer lines. The portal provides SpartanNash with the flexibility to manage the brand images and messaging of each website using their Cazarin-supported web services.
A Lot has happened over the years, but our long-term relationship has not just endured, but sustained, and continues to support the SpartanNash corporate brand and its local partners… in the most local way possible. Because, after all, SpartanNash is a company where relationships matter.
