2021 Winner

For the 2019 Holiday season, both retailers and consumers had a common enemy: lack of time. Black Friday was on November 28th, a week later than previous years. Consumer expectations were high, and their patience was running low. Although consumers love the deep discounts that Black Friday has to offer, the actual shopping moment is quite annoying: big crowds of people, parking nightmares, limited inventory problems, long line-ups at the cash register, the list goes on!

This is also true for online: desired products can quickly go out of stock, retailers’ websites crash during key shopping moments and various shipping and returning issues are very common. It is without a doubt that these frustrations are a pain for consumers and are further amplified with one week less in this year’s holiday shopping season.

In today’s digital age, consumers are more vocal about these frustrations and they do not hesitate to voice their negative experiences on various social media platforms. On key shopping days such as Black Friday weekend, consumers are even more present online and call out retailers whenever they are experiencing shopping difficulties.

Acknowledging this consumer state of mind, the brand built a solution to make the shopping experience easier for consumers, by tuning into the signals that they were sending them in real time! They used multiple sources of listening tools to identify what consumers were doing and saying as they shopped. Consumers send signals to the market in multiple ways; the brand simply listened.

Using the custom-built Google Trend Queries tools and their own website search tool, they identified products that were surprisingly popular. A good example of that was a weighted Serenity blanket and a Theragun massage device. They did not have ads promoting these products at the beginning of the day. But when they realized how popular they were, they activated banner ads for them which allowed them to completely sell their inventory out.

Using TweeterDeck, a social listening tool, they realized that the Footlocker website was down and the Lululemon check out process was down. Therefore, they created an ad that invited those customers to their website, eliminating their pain point. Using the same TweeterDeck tool, they realized that people were complaining about Wal-Mart overselling, then cancelling orders for Apple Watches. Therefore, they created an ad promoting the Apple Watches inventory still available at Sport Chek.

The strategy was simple: the brand zeroed in on a consumer pain point, then they matched it with a Sport Chek offer and pushed that offer to market, in a real-time manner. In fact, the combination of both quantitative data based on product demand and qualitative data based on social listening allowed them to craft relevant ads that benefit both the consumers and their bottom-line; a win-win situation. By doing so, the brand solved all types of problems for consumers: oversold products by their competitors, consumers looking for hot products, competitive site crashes, checkout issues, cancelled orders, poor return policies, the list goes on.

They found the consumer love. Consumers tell them what the hottest products are through their search and navigation habits. Using real-time search queries from Google and their own website search bar, they identified the most sought out products. In other words, they identified consumer demand through real-time analytics. They coupled this knowledge with an inventory API to ensure they had the products in-stock. Finally, they shifted media focus to these hot products through the ads they pushed to market. This entire process took less than 2 hours.

They also found the consumer hate. They tuned into the pain points that consumers were voicing through social platforms. When consumers had a poor experience with their competitors, such as out-of-stock products, website crashes or check out problems, the brand provided them with an opportunistic solution to fix their dissatisfaction.

They continuously provided consumers with solutions where their competitors fell short and they helped improve their shopping experience. As such, the message combinations were almost limitless, for each consumer’s online shopping issue can be matched with a category and product. The listen, learn and assist circle happened in real time.

This strategy yielded impressive results as it allowed Sport Chek to grow total sales by 56% year over year during the Black Friday weekend – a tremendous feat considering it had attained 54% growth the year before. Over 229 million impressions were served from more than 466 different creatives, driving 44% increase in sessions on site. Thanks to the thoughtful sequencing of messaging, they were able to deliver, from paid media, an increase in 34% in website visitors, +25% in product viewers, +45% to add to cart, and +54% in sessions that drove to a purchase, for an increase of 62% in revenues coming from paid media, and a 22% increase in overall return on ad spend, from Thursday to Monday of
the Black Friday weekend.

Credits

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Sport Chek