Competition:

Effie Canada

Ran in:
Canada

Category:
Sustained Success - Products

Brand/Client:
Canadian Tire/Canadian Tire
Retail

Lead Agency:
TAXI

Contributing Company:
Touche!

Case Study Product/Service:

Retail

2019 EFFIE AWARDS CANADA

Classification:
SILVER WINNER National

“TESTED FOR LIFE IN CANADA” Dates Effort Ran:

December 1, 2013 - ongoing
To stake its claim in the Canadian retail landscape, we
developed a platform that has broken-through the
clutter, helped demonstrate quality, restore trust, and Category Situation:
reinforce Canadian Tire’s unique and ownable place Growing
in retail.
It has delivered six years of improved brand health and
sustained sales growth. Credits:
But more than just an advertising idea, TESTED has Jonathan Anderson
become a core brand asset, and has helped Amy Badun
transform Canadian Tire’s core business strategy. Will Cuthbert
Andree Dillon
Frank Macera
Michael Mehrasa
Karen Richardson
Eva Salem
Natalie Street
Megan Wilson

Version: Edited
 Canada / 2019 Silver Effie Award Winner

Executive Summary
The Challenge
Restore trust and confidence in the Canadian Tire brand in the face of an onslaught of US retailers.

The Insight
The best way to know if products meet the needs of life in Canada is to have Canadians test them.

The Idea
Products are tested by a panel of real Canadians – and only if they pass do they get the badge.

Bringing the Idea to Life

Use epic tests to prove Canadian Tire’s quality-TESTED products equip Canadians for whatever life in Canada
throws their way

The Results
In a category prone to short-term tactics, TESTED is a long-lasting initiative, delivering sustained growth across
Canadian Tire’s core metrics.

Effie Awards Category Context

To stake its claim in the Canadian retail landscape, we developed a platform that has broken through the clutter
and helped demonstrate quality, restore trust, and reinforce Canadian Tire’s unique and ownable place in retail.
It has delivered six years of improved brand health and sustained sales growth.
But more than just an advertising idea, TESTED has become a core brand asset and helped transform Canadian
Tire’s core business strategy.

2 AWARDING IDEAS THAT WORK ®

 Canada / 2019 Silver Effie Award Winner

State of the Marketplace & Brand’s Business

To anyone other than Canadians, Canadian Tire (CT) doesn’t make much sense. No other retailer in the world sells
car parts right beside small kitchen appliances or offers Christmas decorations, lawn care, home improvement, and
fishing tackle all in the same place. Yet, to those who call Canada home, Canadian Tire is at the heart of every
community, big and small, and has long been the go-to store for practical products for our everyday lives.
But throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the onslaught of US retailers, such as The Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and
Lowe’s, was challenging our rightful place as “Canada’s Store.” They arrived in Canada with established brand
dominance, had huge advertising budgets, and opened stores quickly. They offered new choices and a wide
selection of products, often at better prices or with a better in-store experience.
In 2013, the imminent arrival of Target was a bigger worry. Target had something that Wal-Mart and The Home Depot
lacked – cachet. And, they had a devoted following of Canadian consumers who had been long awaiting the
arrival of Target in Canada.
During this time, we had slowly started to see a decline in core brand-health scores, such as trusted quality,
innovation, and, most worryingly, “equips me for the jobs and joys of life in Canada.” Despite introducing a steady
stream of innovative, quality products, Canadian Tire was not getting credit for the work they were doing.
While there had always been a soft undercurrent of “Crappy Tire” just below the surface of Canadian Tire’s brand
perception, seeing a real slide in brand equity could no longer be ignored. We could no longer rely on familiarity,
proximity, or a broad assortment of products to be meaningful. We needed to forcefully reclaim our place as
“Canada’s Store.” We needed to rebuild our emotional connection with Canadians, but knew we also needed to be
relevant, tangible, and credible.

Audience
Canadian Tire is present in communities from coast to coast. 90% of Canadians live within 15-minutes of a Canadian
Tire. So, in many ways, our audience is all Canadians – but more specifically, we focused on “Happy Active
Families”, which are young to mature families, living in cities, suburbs, and small towns. They cut across a swath of
demographics, but what they have in common is they’re always on the move, making the most of everyday life.
And, they need lots of everyday stuff to keep the family machine running.

They represent just over 10% of the population, but, being in their prime spending years, they make up nearly 20% of
market spend. 90% are homeowners and 99% own a car. They are the economic-growth engine of Canadian mass
retail.
While they’ve always been core to our success, it had become critical that we reassert our meaning in their lives.
Most of them grew up with Canadian Tire and had latent nostalgia for the brand. But with more retail choices than
ever before, nostalgia couldn't be taken as loyalty. We needed to deepen our relevance in their lives, while
reassuring them that our products are built for life in Canada.

Objectives & KPI’s

We needed to restore trust, reassert Canadian Tire’s core brand meaning, improve quality and innovations scores,
and, ultimately, drive sales.
The brand’s long-term brand positioning has been “equipping Canadians for the jobs and joys of life in Canada.”
So, our primary objective was to protect and defend our position as the retailer that understands life in Canada
better than any other retailer, measured through these core brand-health metrics:
• CT makes the jobs and joys of life in Canada easier
• Quality products
• Latest and hottest products

3 AWARDING IDEAS THAT WORK ®

 Canada / 2019 Silver Effie Award Winner

• Innovative company
These measures were felt to be an indication of whether the brand was holding its own in the face of increased
competition.
We knew that in order to improve Canadians’ perceptions of Canadian Tire’s products, we’d have to create a well-
known and trusted product-review program unlike anything else in the market. We set one aggressive goal and
simple campaign KPI to measure our success: program awareness.
Finally, we’d also measure the overall success of the campaign based on the sales of TESTED products, measured by
overall sales of TESTED products versus non-TESTED products by category.
Sourcing:
Fusion Retail Analytics
Internal Canadian Tire Sales Department
Canadian Tire Target Segments Internal Consumer Panel Data
Sklar
Ipsos

Insight
While conducting research, we uncovered a couple of things we expected: excitement was building for the
imminent arrival of Target in 2013, and disappointment in the quality of many Canadian Tire products (“Crappy
Tire”) was still very much alive.
But we also heard some things that surprised us. Not only was there latent nostalgia for the brand (“I got my first bike
at Canadian Tire”), there was a quiet hope that CT would up their game and fend off US retail giants.
There was also recognition that Canadian Tire was unique; while the assortment of products may seem weird to
some people, to Canadians, it made perfect sense. Of course, Canadian Tire would sell camping equipment, lawn
care, home décor, and snow blowers alongside each other, but you kind of have to live here to get it.
While we were legitimately “Canada’s Store,” we needed to more overtly make this assertion. If we wanted to win, we
needed to find a compelling way to prove that Canadian Tire, more than any other retailer, uniquely understands
what Canadians need to make the most of life in Canada. And, we needed to back it up with tangible proof that
our products could stand up to whatever life throws at them.
So, our core insight was simple: the best way to know if products meet the needs of life in Canada is to have real
Canadians test them.

The Big Idea

Every product is tested by a panel of real Canadian testers – and only if it meets their standards
does it get the TESTED badge.

Bringing the Idea to Life

We set out to create a sustainable campaign platform, not just a short-term tactic. There were three core principles
at the heart of the brief:
1) Credibility
Rather than Canadian Tire telling you about the quality of its products, we decided to put them in the hands of real
Canadians and let them tell us whether they really delivered.
And we needed to ensure that we could demonstrate quality and innovation through demonstrable product
benefits and tangible proof points.
2) Range
We needed to create a platform that was flexible enough to tell stories about everything from car batteries to

4 AWARDING IDEAS THAT WORK ®

 Canada / 2019 Silver Effie Award Winner

camping equipment to car seats – but it also needed to feel like it came from one brand.
3) Breakthrough
This seems obvious, but in a crowded, noisy category, we needed to ensure we would get noticed, and in a way
that was undeniably Canadian Tire. But how could we make product-focused messaging not just informative but
interesting and entertaining.
The TESTED for Life in Canada platform was designed with some core mechanics.
First, we introduced likeable brand spokespeople (Gary and Nico). They provided continuity and quickly became
recognizable brand ambassadors. They also set a tone of storytelling that was entertaining but also approachable.
More than creating typical, banal product demos, we proved the quality of TESTED products through entertaining,
epic tests – everything from making a truck out of ice to test the quality of a cold-weather car battery to putting a
tent through a car wash to test its ability to withstand the worst weather that Canada could offer.
Over time, we started to bring real Canadian testers to the forefront of our communications to help people better
understand that we meant it when we said real testers stood behind these products. And while the focus of TESTED
has always been on our quality products, we also started to put effort into building a deeper understanding of how
the TESTED program actually works (i.e., a panel of over 76,000 Canadian testers across the country testing products
every day).
We created a TESTED badge, which became a highly recognizable badge of approval, across all consumer
communications. From TV to online to flyers to in-store, the TESTED badge quickly became associated with quality
and innovation.
We deployed a wide range of media to tell our story.
Because our audience is most of Canada, we used television for broad reach and to break through and inspire
through entertaining, epic product tests.
We used targeted digital and social to provide more detailed product info in places that were contextually relevant.
And, as consumers got closer to the point of purchase, we used an array of owned channels, such as CT.ca, its
seasonal catalogues known as WOW Guide and IN Guide, the CT flyer, and in-store POP, to reinforce quality and
program awareness and help drive conversion.

Results
The goal in launching TESTED was to restore trust and confidence in the Canadian Tire brand in the face of the
onslaught of US retailers. We would achieve this by having real Canadians test Canadian Tire’s products, proving
they can stand up to whatever life in Canada throws their way. Six years in, the impact of TESTED is undeniable
across all brand, program, and product metrics.
#1. Brand-Health Objective: To protect and defend our positioning as the retailer who understands life in Canada
and its diverse product needs better than any other retailer, we had to grow the following metrics:
• CT makes the jobs and joys of life in Canada easier
• Quality products
• Latest and hottest products
• Innovative company
Ad tracking of the campaign shows consistent growth of the brand’s core health metrics over the in-market
campaign period with consistent growth over time.
#2. Program and Campaign Objective: Grow awareness of the TESTED program and its commitment to quality
products to help drive improved perceptions of Canadian Tire’s product quality, measured simply through program
awareness.
#3. Product-Sales Objectives: Translate Canadians’ confidence in the quality of TESTED products into sales,
measured by the sale of TESTED products.

5 AWARDING IDEAS THAT WORK ®

 Canada / 2019 Silver Effie Award Winner

Other Contributing Factors

Couponing
CRM/Loyalty Programs
Giveaways/Sampling
Pricing Changes

6 AWARDING IDEAS THAT WORK ®

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