Customer Story

Canadian Tire

Canadian Tire uses look-alike modeling to fine-tune marketing messages and partners with customers to test drive products at scale

Canadian Tire Achieved

500+ products tested in one year

70% of sales growth attributed to “tested” products

$1.8m savings in research costs

Overview

Over the past century, Canadian Tire evolved from a small automotive business into Canada’s largest retailer with 1,700 stores and $12.6 billion in annual revenue. With world-class owned brands and market-leading merchandising strategies, they continually innovate with the purpose to excite and serve Canadian customers from coast-to-coast.

Goals:

Improve customer satisfaction

Accelerate innovation

Drive revenue growth

De-risk decisions

Business Challenge

Changing customer expectations and heightened competition challenged Canadian Tire’s leadership to reinforce its position as a top retailer. The Consumer Research team needed direct access to their customers in order to empower the organization to customize marketing messages, test products to improve quality perception, and ensure an exceptional customer experience. In addition, the Data Science team wanted to create predictive models to impact business outcomes, but had a difficult time identifying niche groups of customers with their purchasing data alone, and needed a way to expand knowledge of preference, beliefs and intent.

Solution

The Triangle Community bridges data silos by connecting demographic, psychographic and attitudinal data on their community members, approximately 200,000, to the transactional information in the Triangle loyalty program. A data integration between their Alida Sparq-powered insight community and their loyalty database enables unified, granular customer profiles, look-alike modeling and increased confidence in predictive models. There’s greater accuracy in targeting customized marketing messages to the right people at the right time than if they had simply used existing transactional sales data.

The insight community allows members to opt-in to test and review products publicly. This leads to product innovation, social proof and grass-roots word-of-mouth marketing. In addition, due to the data integration between Alida Sparq and the Triangle loyalty program, members are not asked repeated questions the Consumer Research team already knows and they are only approached about specific products of interest to them.

"The Canadian Tire Customer Panel allows us to increase consumer confidence about the products we sell, create more brand ambassadors, and improve accuracy in personalizing our message to our customers."

– Cedric Painvin, Associate Vice President of Consumer Research, Canadian Tire Corporation