Consumers are rational when making purchase decisions for products that have little brand equity or emotional resonance. 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 disproportionately on growing “share-of-heart”, aim for “store preference” versus offering the lowest prices in the category.

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.

Our idea was based on the “pay-it-forward” concept and was called “Shovel-it-Forward”.

Our 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.

Social media was the platform to spread our message and build our movement.

We launched with high impact 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.

As the movement grew from shoveled driveway to driveway, the campaign grew exponentially on social media platforms. Millions of video and image impressions on Facebook showing Canadians using the #shovelitforward shovel and the resulting cleared driveways were generated.

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.

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

By using the snowy driveway of Canadians as the primary channel to launch this campaign; which solely relied on social media for its success – we were able to leverage a truly innovative media tactic to reinforce the Canadian Tire positioning as Canada’s store for all things winter. It’s a strong example of how to marry insight, strategy, media and message.

Our 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 our 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, we turned to marketing neuroscience. We found out that the strategy needed to build new mnemonic associations and to do so, this 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.

Canadian Tire is a retail chain that sells everything for life in Canada, including winter seasonal products like snow shovels. Not able to compete on pricing versus its American competitor Walmart, Canadian Tire needed to establish superior brand preference (share-of-heart) with consumers to win the winter 2015 retail war.

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 and 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.