What Québec Wants™

Fight club

Sam's Club is shutting down. Somehow I'm not surprised. I remember a meeting with then Wal-Mart Canada president Mario Pilozzi and a Sam's Club exec from Bentonville a few months before the first  grand opening. I kept asking about Sam's Club point of difference versus Costco. I never got a definitive answer. It was as if success was inevitable for any Wal-Mart venture. Sam's Club was a success in the US and other markets and Canada was going to be no different.

So while the news is about Sam's Club calling it quits. The real news should be about Costco Warehouse's story about the survival of the fittest. I hope someone writes it up one day. Anyone competing against Wal-Mart could probably learn from it.

Playing the retirement lottery

This billboard for Fidelity Investments caught my attention while stuck in Toronto traffic.

“Retire on schedule.  Your schedule.”

While I’m nowhere close to retirement and even if I have a generally well laid out strategy for my retirement savings, it made me wonder what retiring “on schedule” would actually mean. Semi-retirement in my fifties? Full retirement by 65? Work in some capacity beyond 65? Hard to know for sure.

Yet when asked by Ipsos Reid what they expect to do when they’re 65, Canadians gave clear answers:

• 13% expect to be working full-time.
• 40% expect to be semi-retired/working part-time.
• 47% expect to be retired and no longer working.

(Source: 19^th annual Ipsos Reid/RBC RRSP poll, conducted from October 16 to 23, 2008 via an online survey of 3,113 Canadian boomers (ages 50 to 69 with assets of at least $100,000). The sample includes 934 boomers who say they plan to retire in the next 5 years and 139 who plan to retire within 5 years and who are also business owners.)

Compared to Canadians in the ROC, Quebeckers can't wait to retire.

They are the least likely to say they expect to be working full time when they’re 65 and most likely to say they will be fully retired by then.

Perhaps even more telling is the fact that if they had enough money to retire today, Quebeckers are significantly more likely to say they would retire immediately (39% compared to the national average of 27%).

That should in part explain Quebeckers’ attraction to lotteries. 64% of Quebeckers bought lottery tickets in the past year compared to 54% of Canadian in the rest of the country (PMB 2008).

Bad luck

General Mills, the makers of Lucky Charms pleaded guilty to violating provisions of Quebec’s  law with an ad targeting children under 13 years old. Lucky Charms’ web site featured the cereal's leprechaun mascot in animated games that were found to contain advertising messages aimed at children.

Saputo was also recently fined. (Read this previous post – Risky business). McDonald’s and Burger King are facing charges. It’s clear that the Office de la protection du consommateur is taking the law and the web seriously.

My advice to marketers: get good advice before to avoid charges after.

Start a business. Just don't read this.

If you live in Québec.

In 2006, Jacques Bouchard published an updated version of his 36 responsive keys of Quebeckers originally published in 1978. A few keys disappeared over the past 30 years and a few were added. One of the new ones is entrepreneurship (l’entrepreneuriat). Bouchard argued that Quebeckers have come a  long way since the quiet revolution. He used convincing data to support this assertion.

However, Bouchard did not write about how Quebeckers’ entrepreneurship compares with that of Canadians in the rest of the country.

“The situation is alarming” according to Mario Girard, President of the fondation de l'entrepreneurship , quoted in a recent issue of Les Affaires.

His assessment is based on the findings from a survey of 17,192 Canadians the foundation commissioned from Leger Marketing in January. The full report in French is available online .

The highlights:

Quebeckers are less experienced entrepreneurs.
Alone or with others, have you ever launched a business or taken over an existing one?
16% in Québec compared to 27% in the ROC (this includes autonomous workers).

Quebeckers in general are less likely to view entrepreneurs as job and wealth creators.
Québec 63%
ROC 69%
 
Less confident
% who believe they have the skills and abilities to start a business.
Québec 45%
ROC 55%

It’s a one-year snapshot. The survey will be repeated annually to provide trended data according to Les Affaires.

Until then, I’ll just hop on the Bombardier-built Toronto subway while listening to a Cirque du Soleil soundtrack, looking at posters for Astral media and reading Quebecor’s Toronto Sun.

Old friends

When mom, dad and granny are your Facebook friends.

According to AdAge, social networking is no longer a youth phenomenon.

As of January, more than 50% of Facebook users and 44% of MySpace users in the U.S. were over 35 years old, according to ComScore estimates. The single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on both Facebook and MySpace is now between 35 and 44. Indeed, Facebook says its fastest-growing demo is 55-plus.

So far, Facebook's aging demos haven't turned off the college set: It's the most popular website on campus above Google and Yahoo, according to an Anderson Analytics poll of college students last fall. MySpace has taken a bit of a tumble in the eyes of college students, falling to No. 4 this year from No. 2 last year school year and No. 1 during the 2006-2007 school year.

College kids might still be addicted to Facebook but my daughter isn’t too crazy about the fact that her dad can read what’s on her wall. So uncool.

Not so private labels

I remember a meeting at General Foods in the early eighties when someone arrived with the first issue of the Insider’s Report filled with President’s Choice products. Until then “store brands” were more like generics than true brands. We had been watching Marks & Spencer and Boots in Europe but there wasn’t anything close to this in Canada. Years later, I remember another meeting at Christie Brown where we were assessing the impact of PC’s Decadent chocolate chip cookies on Chips Ahoy! It wasn't pretty. Suddenly the "grocers" knew more than the "marketers".

The “brand tax”

Those were the days when Dave Nichol talked about the “brand tax” national brands were charging and declared that brand loyalty was simply the absence of something better. Whether you call them store brands or private label brands, they’ve now become brands with strong equities that often rival that of so-called “national brands”. And the tough economic times makes them even more desirable.

Marketers Face Moment of Truth As Retailers' Lines Soar to Historic Sales High.

That’s what Advertising Age is declaring today in its online edition.

Some industry watchers predict that the structural slowdown in consumer spending could last four to 10 years. Combined with increasingly marketing-savvy and aggressive retailers, it could conspire to push private-label shares to a dizzying high -- as much as six times the roughly one-point gain already seen since the recession began in December 2007.

It’s no surprise then that retailers have been gradually increasing their advertising spending to build those brands. In 2007, Wal-Mart was ranked 20th and Loblaws 24th on the list of top media spenders in Canada.

Expect them to soon be in the top ten.

“Outsmart. Don’t outspend the competition.” These days you might do both in Québec.

Outsmarting rather than outspending the competition, while easier said than done, makes sense in good and bad times. The current economic climate will create opportunities to outspend your competitors without increasing your investments. Stealing share of mind is a bargain during a recession. Just maintain  your spending while they cut theirs.

This one of the points we discuss in our recently published paper entitled Brand building in Québec in uncertain times.

Download the full text in PDF here. Brand building in Québec in uncertain times

Social networks. "Opinion and theory are no match for experience."

A follow-up to yesterdays post In your face about social media.

A piece by B.L. Ochman in the current issue of Business Week on debunking six social media myths offers a reality check: “The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.”

Here are two myths. Read the rest on Ochman’s blog blog or in Business Week.

Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money.
You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

In your Face

It should not come as a surprise that Facebook is acting as a business instead of some kind of collaborative, wiki tool to facilitate social networking among friends. Sure, "anyone can join and it's free". But if that were all it was, Facebook would not be valued at $3.7 Billions. With its 150 million friends around the globe, Facebook has to be monetized to be a true asset. And that leads to initiatives like the "beacon" a few years ago and more recently the issue around the ownership of its user-generated content.

As marketers, we're told that the trick now is to engage with consumers in meaningful conversations. As I watch my kids chat, text, write on walls, post videos and comment on pictures, I see conversations between friends. And I see advertisers' attempts to be part of the conversation. Yet my sense is that most of it is tuned out.

Friends think they created a private space or at least a semi-private space accessible by invitation only.  What would have been written in a private journal is online for friends to see. The guy you once worked with now views photos that would have been selectively shared with a few friends. A status update about doing laundry is more information than most care for. Not to mention Joe who works for that big company and now declares that he's become a fan of Acme product with a link for those who care or are curious enough.

My prediction: the narcissistic need to display yourself on the web and the urge to collect as many friends as possible to be connected with will remain. But there will be increasing resistance to junk intruding these "private" spaces, to attempts to shape conversations or legalese that claim ownership of user generated content. Social networks will learn that friends are just a few clicks away from another, friendlier space they can call their own.

Quebeckers believe (more).

Canada wants to "Own the podium" in 2010.

A survey conducted by Ipsos Reid during the first week of February on behalf of Canwest News Service and Global Television asked Canadians this question:

The Canadian Olympic Committee has set a goal of winning the most medals at the 2010 games. In the 2006 Winter Olympics, Canada finished third in the medal count, five medals behind first-place Germany. Do you think that the expectations set for the Canadian athletes for the 2010 Olympic games are…

• Unrealistic and overly ambitious (9%)
• Attainable but a stretch (37%)
• A realistic target (42%)
• Something we should be able to do with ease (3%)

The only significant regional difference was in Quebec where a greater number think it is a realistic target (55% compared to 42% for the national average).