Canadian Tire

Business Challenge

Canadian Tire is a leader in the industry for their innovation, impactful advertising, merchandising, and world-class customer loyalty. They are always developing new items and creating engaging experiences for their consumers. Since the organization serves a broad spectrum of diverse consumers from across Canada with a variety of needs, interests, habits, and behaviours, inclusion is essential.

With a tremendous amount of brand recognition and consumer awareness, Canadian Tire wanted to find a way to speak to customers themselves without having to rely on external sampling.

Solution

Over the past decade, Canadian Tire has built a customer panel that is now 210,000 members strong. What began as a main channel for feedback on new product, packaging, and creative concept testing has now grown into an advanced, data-driven insights program that touches nearly every part of the business.

The number of research studies the insights team conducts has grown exponentially, from 20 projects in the first year to a peak of 200. Studies have become more sophisticated, evolving from simple concept testing to include choice-based modeling, conjoint studies, qualitative feedback programs, and longitudinal studies. The insights team spends significant time with stakeholders to understand their use cases and design the most appropriate ways to find the right participants at the right time to make the most impact.

Canadian Tire gains a deeper comprehension of the requirements and motivations of its consumers with every engagement. The insight team has a thorough grasp of various audience demographics thanks to the integration of transactional, loyalty, and direct consumer feedback data. This treasure trove of rich data is tagged with custom profile variables and managed via a central data lake. Canadian Tire has the power to easily segment studies for specific audiences such as those who have purchased certain products or demographic criteria such as New Canadians.

Finding the right people at the right time

The work of the Canadian Tire research team to progressively profile members and align a wealth of data to key consumer groups means the team can get very specific with who they reach out to for feedback. “If we need to find people who have bought a certain item, have a specific interest or live in a certain place, we can because we have that information already.” explains Jenna Beales, Senior Consultant, Qualitative Research 

This level of granularity is a huge benefit to the speed and efficiency of the team and provides Canadian Tire with ready-to-go access to groups that would be harder or impossible to find otherwise. “Often we know we can do a better job internally segmenting our panelists to find the right group than we could ever find externally”  says Jenna.

Concept testing and customer-led experiences

Canadian Tire collaborates with customers to test and validate many of the products they put on their shelves. Each and every phase of the product development process takes consumer input into account. Customers contribute their ideas for innovative products throughout the ideation phase and review early prototypes and beta test products as they approach launch. 

As the program has grown, the panel also informs the development of important product categories and helps teams across the business build relationships with consumers to navigate trends and plan what’s next. From marketing messaging to persona development, the panel is a go-to resource and impacts strategy and experience improvement across the entire business.

Results

The research team has become an influential business partner within the Canadian Tire organization. Stakeholders and executives know to engage them when they need validation or consumer feedback is necessary. “Our executives now say, ‘Let’s ask the panel ’. They understand the value of the community and know that our team has a closeness to members to get answers fast,”  says Cedric Painvin, Associate VP of Consumer Research. Over the years, the panel has grown to include customers from other brands under the Canadian Tire umbrella helping to understand shopping habits and trends to support even further across the organization. 

With a significant reduction in external research cost and faster time to insights, the research team no longer judges its success in terms of the number of projects completed per year but the impact on broader business cases. The team has implemented new capabilities and now takes their research beyond the typical survey to conduct ongoing analysis tied to larger business goals. 

And most importantly the team is extremely proud of the data management and ongoing maintenance of such a large and engaged community of customers. Most Canadians have a strong connection to the company and the research team are brand ambassadors, demonstrating to customers that the company cares about their opinions.