Canadian Retailer - Store 2014 - 37

Irvine: Canadian Tire is a great example of a company in
Canada who is doing it well. Specifically with the Sport Chek
brand both in-store and online. They have been very innovative with regards to shifting the way they reach out to their
customer, specifically in relation to their flyer. They asked
themselves, "At the end of the day, what is a flyer?" and concluded that it wasn't the paper, but the pictures of product on
sale that was ultimately getting people into stores. They separated the channel of delivery, and took the same business
insights and moved to replicate the flyer experience on their
mobile devices; they moved from a newspaper to newsfeed
mentality, and it worked. By pulling the paper flyer, Sport
Chek actually saw an increase in sales.

"Where your customers are, can be as
critical as who they are."
- GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Kruh: In conversation with Michael Medline at Canadian
Tire, he told me that the company had 250 people working on
the flyer! The Canadian Tire flyer has iconic status for some.
Boomers love their flyers. Flipping through the Canadian
Tire flyer with a coffee on a Saturday morning has an air of
nostalgia and a level of familiarity that is comforting. To try
something new and get rid of the Canadian Tire flyer entirely
is a bold move-it takes guts.
Brisebois: Google has become famous for saying, "where
your customers are, can be as critical as who they are." We
have been talking a lot about data, and retailers have a perception that data is only valuable to big retailers. How should
mid-size and smaller retailers be thinking about data, and
what does this tell us about the 'path to purchase'?

Sebastien: Start with your customer. At
Google we have built our business around
this and it drives every decision we make.
How can we make our customer happier, and
create less friction in their daily lives? You
have enough data to know where your customers are and what they want. Eighty five
per cent of Canadians are online, 93 per cent
use search on a daily basis, and yet 97 per
cent of purchases are still made in an actual
store. This suggests that they are researching online before going into the store. Don't
grade your success in online e-commerce
based on sales alone, but rather figure out
what drove them from the mobile device into
your store. That's where the dollars are. You
need to understand the 'path to purchase'-
from their mobile device to when they walk
into your store. There are a
lot of touch-points-but if you
can bring the focus back to
the customer, and their interaction between spaces, you
can essentially build an equation that says-here is the
impact online and here is the
'footpath' to my store.
Irvine: It's complex, and it's
even more challenging to determine where people are coming
from, where they are going, and
to track them online. The silos
are going away between online and in-store and all of this
makes it difficult to develop a
strategy. What is constant is the
development of a personal online identity. With social media,
you have the ability to incorporate personalized data around business insights.
Marry the two and you can create a personalized experience for your customer.
Kruh: It starts with the fundamentals-'price,
quality, and service' and you need to do all
three to succeed in retail, but now you need
to do all three via technology and online. It
has added a layer of complexity, and it can be
difficult to keep up. Take Staples for example,
they monitor their sites 24-7 and get back to
the customer within 3 to 4 hours. Or we can

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