ampm (ARCO)
Environment
Signage
Visual Systems
Branding convenience
Ampm, one of the world's best US-based convenience stores, is designed to be a self-service convenience store offering a wide variety of important services for busy city dwellers.
Challenges
Atlantic Richfield, successfully repositioned as ARCO, a US-based oil company planned to redesign and expand its retail presence at gas stations. A distinctive, independent brand was needed to build awareness for its convenience stores. This included:
Designing a take-out fast food center that would be a standard component of new locations and retrofitted into existing stores
Resolving customer traffic flow problems resulting from mixed usage (gasoline, groceries, fast food)
Actions
Introduced “am/pm” brand identity, expressing round-the-clock availability and convenience, setting the new retail concept apart from ARCO's core service station business.
Developed new store design and graphics system for installation at ARCO service stations or as stand-alone business in any retail environment.
The new design has helped to increase sales on high margin prepared foods from 20 percent to 35 percent. ARCO's C-store concept has been so successful that they are now being franchised to non-U.S. petroleum companies for implementation worldwide, most recently in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, Mexico, Argentina and Canada.