Canadian Tire: #Shovelitforward

Credits & Description:

BRAND: Canadian Tire
CATEGORY: Retail
REGION: Canada
DATE: February - April 2015
AGENCY: Touche!PHD
MEDIA CHANNEL: Direct Marketing,Online
Insight
Low-involvement products are critical to stimulate in-store sales. Consumers who visit a mass merchandising store to buy one such item will also purchase between 4-7 additional items that are not on their list. These items, if purchased at Canadian Tire, are defacto not purchased at Walmart. Therefore, the concept of “first store visit” is of primary importance.
Consumers are rational when making purchase decisions for products that have little brand equity or emotional resonance. This applies to winter seasonal products such as shovels, scrapers etc… Without brand preference, price becomes the most important factor for low involvement purchases. That was a real challenge since Canadian Tire couldn’t compete on price with its main rival American giant, Walmart. To win Canadian Tire needed to focus disproportionally on growing “share-of-heart”, aim for “store preference” versus offering the lowest prices in the category.
Founded by two brothers, Canadian Tire debuted in 1922. Conversely, Walmart which is perceived as the “American invader” first conquered Canada in 1994. To differentiate itself, Canadian Tire now relies heavily on its home grown roots and insight into the local culture. One of these “truly Canadian” insights, as shown by many consumer studies, is that the harshness of winter months cultivates the great generosity and kindness of Canadians. Helping one another out to get through the downside of winter is uniquely part of the Canadian culture.
Through this campaign, Canadian Tire tapped upon this heartfelt insight, with the goal to reaching consumers shopping for low-involvement seasonal products.
Strategy
Touché! PHD's challenge was to use media to increase the brand share-of-heart, a function that is usually attributed to creative not media. Share-of-heart is calculated by the percentage of consumers who identify the brand when asked to name a company from whom they would prefer to buy a product – it’s is a question of consumer psychology.
To understand how media could influence this metric, the agency turned to marketing neuroscience. It found out that the strategy needed to build new mnemonic associations and to do so, the focus should be on creating an “emotional” reaction. This is because there is a correlation between how emotion is felt and how much new memory is encoded in the brain.
Emotions are feelings created by chemicals in the brain e.g.: Endorphins, Dopamine, Serotonin and Oxytocin; each play an important role helping to encode new memory - it’s here that media strategy delivered its greatest impact.
With a limited budget, it could have placed ads in the weekly newspapers to promote featured items, from which no emotional reaction could be garnered. Instead to generate a little warmth during the winter months, the agency created a movement where Canadians shoveled their neighbour’s driveway, they felt great about it, creating an “emotional experience” which seared the positive associations in their minds, increasing share-of-heart.
1. Strenuous activity such as shoveling a driveway produces endorphins; which makes you feel fantastic.
2. Setting a goal and meeting it, such as completing the task of shoveling the driveway of a neighbour produces dopamine, responsible for the feeling of self-satisfaction & accomplishment.
3. The selfless act of human generosity produces oxytocin, responsible for the sensation of love and trust.
4. Conversely having your driveway cleared unexpectedly by a stranger produces serotonin, responsible for feelings of pride and status.
Execution
The idea was based on the “pay-it-forward” concept – you have been the recipient of an act of generosity (happy surprise) and feel incited to do the same in return (feel good about yourself for doing so). Our concept was called “Shovel-it-Forward”.
The agency used the home driveway of consumers as an untapped media channel - it snows a lot in Canada and Canadian Tire is where you go for all your snow removal needs – it offered strategic relevance.
The strategy was to spread a little warmth during the cold winter months by surprising 200 unsuspecting Canadians with a freshly cleared driveway to start their day. Making sure to leave behind the Canadian Tire #shovelitforward shovel, which contained the following message:
“A neighbour used me to clear your driveway! Do the same for someone else and leave me with them. See my story and share yours at shovelitforward.ca.”
Even the best ideas need a well-thought media plan to ignite the viral spark. As this campaign was all about sharing, the agency needed a social plan to spread the message in the online space. Social media was the platform to spread the message and build a movement.
It launched with high impact, as the first advertiser to use video on Instagram, becoming the most successful Instagram campaign globally. The Shovel-it-Forward microsite tracked all of the cleared driveways in real time via the interactive map, consumers posted their own story, uploading pictures and videos of their contribution, generating millions of impressions and video views. It encouraged sharing and spreading the message on Facebook and Twitter, garnering an astounding 23.15% engagement rates and 30 points lift in awareness.
As the movement grew from shoveled driveway to driveway, the campaign grew exponentially on social media platforms. Canadians embraced “Shovel-it-Forward” – it became a social experiment demonstrating the generosity of Canadians. Millions of video and image impressions on Facebook showing Canadians using the #shovelitforward shovel and the resulting cleared driveways were generated. The initial 200 cleared driveways started a movement that touched millions of Canadians in a matter of six weeks.
Results
The media metrics were astonishing:
- The Facebook portion of the campaign generated 3.4 MM video views. The engagement rate was an astounding 23.15%, resulting in a very low cost per view of 4 cents.
- The Instagram campaign saw a 45 point lift in recall, 2.8x the Instagram average. The Shovelitforward stories snowballed into one of the most successful Instagram campaign globally!
The hard sales metrics were even more impressive. Canadian Tire dominated its big box American competitor Walmart, in the category of “winter seasonal” products and that, without the benefit of offering the lowest prices. By continually striving to become Canada’s” best loved brand” in its competitive set, the media strategy paid-off. With returns of disproportionally increased store traffic and market share; all contributing to year over year same store sales growth of 4.7% where competitors saw overall declines of 1.5%. Canadian Tire CEO even mentioned the Shovelitforward campaign in the annual report of the company:
“We owned the seasonal business, helping drive the Canadian Tire banner to its best comparable store sales results in a decade” – Michael Medline CEO, Canadian Tire.