2021 Winner
BronzeBest in Retail
Sport Chek
"The Gift You Didn’t Get"
Touché!
"The Gift You Didn’t Get"
Touché!
With Black Friday being the main shopping occasion, Boxing Day, while still important, has become somewhat of a secondary retail event. In fact, most consumers would have bought their gifts and favourite products during Black Friday. As such, Sport Chek had to figure out a way to be salient during this last stretch of the holiday season to meet sales objectives.
Through focus groups and research, the agency unearthed the following insight: “The Holiday Shopper’s Dilemma”. Each year, as the holiday season approaches, consumers are stuck between two decisions once they have identified a product they really wanted for themselves: to buy it on sale during Black Friday or wait until Christmas in hopes that their loved ones get it for them as a gift.
On one hand, shoppers can buy the item during Black Friday, but this might “ruin the moment” if they end up receiving it as a Christmas gift. On the other hand, if they decide not to buy, they would run the risk of not getting their desired gift at all for Christmas, on top of missing out on purchasing it with Black Friday discounts.
Based on this insight, it follows that consumers belonging to the second group – those who waited until Christmas but unfortunately ended up not receiving the gift they wished for – are subject to frustrations as they now regret not buying during Black Friday and missed out on deals.
As such, their strategy was clear: to help consumers who didn’t receive the gift they hoped for, by giving them a second chance to purchase that item during Boxing Week, as Sport Chek deals were also enticing enough to draw consumers back. By leveraging this sentiment of disappointment, there was an opportunity for Sport Chek to create a win-win situation: have their consumer’s back
and boost their sales.
The biggest challenge of this idea was to identify consumers who didn’t receive the gifts they wanted. As such, their approach unfolded in three steps: determine intent, recognize patterns and deploy.
To achieve the first step of determining intent, they leveraged Google Analytics and were able to build a “high intent” profile based on different signals, including: time spent on product page, frequency of daily repeat visit, volume of add to cart without purchase among other data points. This profile was then cross-referenced on all categories and allowed us to pinpoint those where consumers have expressed highest interest. They chose the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday as their period of reference as this is when consumers are most actively looking for gifts they want.
Next, on Christmas Day (December 25th) they analysed which categories had the same high intent profile. This is based on the premise that people who haven’t received the gift they wanted will come back on Sport Chek’s site the day after Christmas to look for products they’d want to buy during Boxing Week. During this analysis, they discovered that 80% of the searched items both on Black Friday and Christmas Day were for the same top twenty products. This meant that they could capture the bulk of the demand simply by supporting these items.
After validation of stock inventory levels for these products, they were ready for the final step of this process; which was deployment. On Boxing Day, armed with a list of gifts that consumers didn’t get, they deployed personalized ads across Facebook and Google to reach users who expressed high intent. They created dozens of audiences’ pools filled with users who visited these top twenty product pages and scaled it with similar audiences. Customized creatives were created with the right message, product and offer and thus they helped those unfortunate consumers to obtain the gift they
didn’t get for Christmas.
By putting themselves in these consumers’ shoes, they realized that first they had to understand how consumers behave when they are actively looking for a product they wanted. Once intent is determined, they would analyze to see if the same behaviour is expressed prior to Boxing Day and finally deploy their tactics to reach those identified consumers with customized messages corresponding to the products they were looking for. Through this they positioned Sport Chek as a brand who not only understands a recurring consumer dilemma but is also active in solving it.
The campaign generated very positive results, yielding 3x higher conversion rate and +130% higher in return on ad spend compared to campaigns with the same optimization and audience type. Overall, it contributed to this year’s Boxing Week success with an increase of +5% in revenues, +20% in traffic to site and +10% increase in return on ad spend. The promoted products sold +28% more units with an increase of +47% in revenue. They also generated 40% more add to carts and 20% cart to purchases.
Through focus groups and research, the agency unearthed the following insight: “The Holiday Shopper’s Dilemma”. Each year, as the holiday season approaches, consumers are stuck between two decisions once they have identified a product they really wanted for themselves: to buy it on sale during Black Friday or wait until Christmas in hopes that their loved ones get it for them as a gift.
On one hand, shoppers can buy the item during Black Friday, but this might “ruin the moment” if they end up receiving it as a Christmas gift. On the other hand, if they decide not to buy, they would run the risk of not getting their desired gift at all for Christmas, on top of missing out on purchasing it with Black Friday discounts.
Based on this insight, it follows that consumers belonging to the second group – those who waited until Christmas but unfortunately ended up not receiving the gift they wished for – are subject to frustrations as they now regret not buying during Black Friday and missed out on deals.
As such, their strategy was clear: to help consumers who didn’t receive the gift they hoped for, by giving them a second chance to purchase that item during Boxing Week, as Sport Chek deals were also enticing enough to draw consumers back. By leveraging this sentiment of disappointment, there was an opportunity for Sport Chek to create a win-win situation: have their consumer’s back
and boost their sales.
The biggest challenge of this idea was to identify consumers who didn’t receive the gifts they wanted. As such, their approach unfolded in three steps: determine intent, recognize patterns and deploy.
To achieve the first step of determining intent, they leveraged Google Analytics and were able to build a “high intent” profile based on different signals, including: time spent on product page, frequency of daily repeat visit, volume of add to cart without purchase among other data points. This profile was then cross-referenced on all categories and allowed us to pinpoint those where consumers have expressed highest interest. They chose the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday as their period of reference as this is when consumers are most actively looking for gifts they want.
Next, on Christmas Day (December 25th) they analysed which categories had the same high intent profile. This is based on the premise that people who haven’t received the gift they wanted will come back on Sport Chek’s site the day after Christmas to look for products they’d want to buy during Boxing Week. During this analysis, they discovered that 80% of the searched items both on Black Friday and Christmas Day were for the same top twenty products. This meant that they could capture the bulk of the demand simply by supporting these items.
After validation of stock inventory levels for these products, they were ready for the final step of this process; which was deployment. On Boxing Day, armed with a list of gifts that consumers didn’t get, they deployed personalized ads across Facebook and Google to reach users who expressed high intent. They created dozens of audiences’ pools filled with users who visited these top twenty product pages and scaled it with similar audiences. Customized creatives were created with the right message, product and offer and thus they helped those unfortunate consumers to obtain the gift they
didn’t get for Christmas.
By putting themselves in these consumers’ shoes, they realized that first they had to understand how consumers behave when they are actively looking for a product they wanted. Once intent is determined, they would analyze to see if the same behaviour is expressed prior to Boxing Day and finally deploy their tactics to reach those identified consumers with customized messages corresponding to the products they were looking for. Through this they positioned Sport Chek as a brand who not only understands a recurring consumer dilemma but is also active in solving it.
The campaign generated very positive results, yielding 3x higher conversion rate and +130% higher in return on ad spend compared to campaigns with the same optimization and audience type. Overall, it contributed to this year’s Boxing Week success with an increase of +5% in revenues, +20% in traffic to site and +10% increase in return on ad spend. The promoted products sold +28% more units with an increase of +47% in revenue. They also generated 40% more add to carts and 20% cart to purchases.
Credits
Touché!Sport Chek