Superfood / Real Canadian Superstore

Real Canadian Superstore is one of Canada’s largest mass-market retailers, operated by Loblaw Companies. Competing in the high-stakes grocery and general merchandise space against rivals like Walmart and Costco, the brand serves millions of Canadians across food, fashion, health, and home — making it one of the country’s most expansive one-stop shopping destinations.

In the highly competitive retail food space, Real Canadian Superstore was at-risk of losing customers to its close rivals, Walmart and Costco, especially in Ontario. With each of these rivals building their brands around unique, ownable strengths, Canadians were developing clear ideas of what these retailers offered. While Real Canadian Superstore in comparison felt undifferentiated and communications were often misattributed to Walmart. ONE23WEST was engaged to work with the Real Canadian Superstore team to reposition and revitalize the brand and its identity.

This journey began by partnering with the Loblaw Strategy and Research teams and undergoing an extensive research and internal discovery process to uncover a differentiating value proposition. Using learnings from this process we redefined Real Canadian Superstore’s brand strategy, dialing up the importance of its unique strength relative to its competitors, diversity of selection – both on the shelf and across the range of categories including food, fashion, health, home, optical, etc.

There are other big stores, but none that offer the depth and variety of foods and items that Real Canadian Superstore can. This is particularly important because in Canada, we have people of over 250 ethnic origins or ancestries. So we’re a country with a lot of different kinds of people that love a lot of different kinds of food. Powered by this insight, our strategy was to celebrate our selection by showing just how diverse Canada’s people, cultures, foods and lives really are with selection at Real Canadian Superstore.

Real Canadian Superstore has everything for every taste. So in the campaign, we wanted to make sure their diverse customer base knew they could get what they needed in store, and also make sure they felt represented in our ads.

The campaign tells the story of who we are as Canadians through the foods we love. On TV, we launched with a spot speaks to the pride we have in foods like maple syrup and back bacon – but also the special foods we eat here in Canada like perogies, dim sum and the Filipino layered dessert, halo halo.

At the end of the launch spot, the voiceover says with pride, “These are the foods we all love. And you can find them all here.” The spot seeks to finally define Canadian cuisine: it’s diverse and incredible and deserves to be celebrated.

The launch TV was broadcast in English, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin and Tagalog and ran on multicultural media as well as traditional media.

The campaign also includes a 30-second spot that highlights the diverse needs of every household. The camera follows a dad around the store as he selects products for his vegan daughter and his wife who’s “super carnivore” and more. Twelve more online videos pinpoint even more individualized shopping needs and habits, featuring a mom holding up a halal chicken, relieved that dinner has made itself, or a new father who’s buying armfuls of coffee tins to stay awake.

The diversity and selection story continued in out-of-home media, with transit platform takeovers, billboards and hoardings in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. Ten real customers of Real Canadian Superstore were featured, representing people of different backgrounds, abilities, genders, ages and tastes. Beside each portrait was a stylish table top shot of the items they really buy when they shop with us.

An important part of the new Super Platform was an evolved design system that brings a boldness in look to support our message of variety and inclusion. We updated their colour palette to be as colourful as every Canadian and developed a modular design system to accommodate any medium from instore to video and especially social media.

Throughout the production of the campaign a diverse group of Canadians were involved, including photographers Wade Hudson, Vicky Lam, and music from Indigenous band Halluci Nation (formerly Tribe Called Red), Toronto hip hop artist Charmaine, producer Tyson Kuteyi and many more. All work was created in consultation with leaders from various cultures to ensure we’re creating positive messaging for all.

Brand results:
Our brand tracking by Fusion Analytics revealed that our creative had tremendous positive brand impact and resonated with consumers, surpassing several industry benchmarks.

– Brand impact performed 6% higher than industry norms;
– Consumers indicated our message was clear, relevant, new and most importantly, convincing (16% higher than industry norms);
– 14% higher than benchmarks with brand impact with multicultural targets;
– Consumers found the creative enjoyable and memorable.

Furthermore, a quantitative research of 500+ Canadians conducted in June 2021 showed the following results for the 30-second SuperFood Anthem video:

– 85% agree the ad communicates: “RCSS’ product diversity reflects Canada’s cultural diversity”;
– 63% non-frequent RCSS shoppers say the ad made them more likely to shop at RCSS;
– 66% felt more positive about RCSS having seen the ad;
– 91% agree the ad communicates: “Real Canadian Superstore offers a great variety of products”;
– 82% agree the ad communicates: “Real Canadian Superstore caters to each shopper’s different needs”;
– 74% agree the ad communicates: “Real Canadian Superstore reflects the values Canadians care about”;
– 85% agree the ad communicates: “Real Canadian Superstore is the store for all Canadians”;
– 65% felt a lot or somewhat more positive about RCSS having seen the ad;
– 74% said they enjoyed seeing the ad.

Digital results:
Our campaign exceeded benchmark performance on all digital mediums the campaign ran on: Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.

Most notable, on YouTube, our 30-second skippable ads were viewed 50% higher than benchmarks, demonstrating a genuine interest from our audience to view the content.