What Québec Wants™

Hard to please

Ipsos-Reid recently asked 2006 adult Canadians online about their views on gift giving this holiday season.

It looks like residents of Québec and B.C. are slightly harder to please. And they know it.

Which of the following is closest to your point of view when it comes to receiving Christmas presents?

How about a vacuum cleaner or a handgun?

       

French discount

Hotels usually claim that ‘kids eat free’ or offer seniors discounts.

Here’s a promotional strategy I have not seen before.

According to a report by the CBC, a Quebec City hotel says it wants to promote pride in the French language by offering discounts to francophones.

As part of its “Franco-friendly” campaign, the Chateau Laurier hotel, just steps from the Plains of Abraham, said it would offer a 15 per cent discount to Acadians and French-speaking people from outside Quebec.

“We are extremely proud to be not only the first ‘French-friendly’ establishment in the Americas but also to be the establishment that francophones can count on to valorize their cultural heritage,” the hotel’s president, Alain Girard, said in a statement.

There's nothing discriminatory about this according to the hotel’s marketing manager.

Comments posted on the CBC’s website tend to suggest otherwise. Here’s a sample:

Typical of anti-English Quebec. No wonder their tourism is down.

What a fabulous way to promote the French culture. Is that even legal what they are doing?

The hotel manager’s intention is not to promote a special discount BUT to make clear their position about the political language issue. However like the rest of their reasons for rejecting the english, it shows how wrong they are and how little they care about anglophone national and international tourists that visit Quebec.

Cause marketing

According to Edelman's 2009 Goodpurpose Consumer Study, 57% of consumers worldwide say a brand or product earned their business because it was associated with, or supported, a good cause. Edelman's chief creative officer and founder of Goodpurpose, Mitch Markson, is quoted in Brandchannel:

People all over the world are now wearing, driving, eating, and living their social purpose as sustained engagement with good causes becomes a new criterion for social status and good social behavior.

You can read the full article here: Cause marketing grows, but is a backlash ahead?

For more on pink marketing, this other article offers an interesting perspective: Breast-cancer brands aren’t all equal.

If you understand French, you might want to watch my interview on the subject on TFO via this link:

Home décor and cashmere scarves

Last week, home renovation retailer RONA launched a new banner in Québec called STUDIO by RONA.

It is described as a new type of store with an offer based on colours and combinations. The stores will offer paint products and accessories as part of what Rona describes as a “fully rounded architectural paint solution”. The offer also includes wallpaper, floor coverings, mouldings, window treatments and a whole line of services that reflect the needs and tastes of our customers.

Rona’s press release refers to recent findings from market research firm CROP: According to CROP, the home is becoming a focal point of self-expression and entertainment, a social gathering place where people want to express their creativity. In terms of deco-renovation, consumers are looking for a more complete and varied offer, where they can find unique or custom-made products to add an original touch to their homes.

On a related note, and perhaps further evidence that the lines are blurring in the home renovation and personal fashion space, the Restoration Hardware store close to our offices on Yonge Street looks like an apparel retailer this holiday season. The lead item seems to be Cashmere scarves judging by the window display. For more on this, read this piece in Brandchannel; From Screws To Scarves: Restoration Hardware's Holiday Surprise.

 

A psychiatrist’s view of Québec City

Québec City has hired cultural archetypes expert Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, author of The Culture Code, to refresh the city’s image.

According to The Rapaille Institute’s website “Archetype Studies is unique. We are not consultants and do not charge by the hour or day. We do not conduct market research, and do not write reports. Our commitment to the client is that at the end of the process, you will thoroughly understand the Archetype studied. The Archetype Team will speak a common language, the unconscious Logic of Emotion of your customers.”

Dr. Rapaille is a colourful fellow who’s obviously impressed some of the world’s most sophisticated marketers. Can’t wait to see the outcome and what he discovers about Québec City’s residents’ and visitors’ unconscious logic of emotion.

For the birds

There’s a rather intriguing poster these days in the Toronto subway system. It’s for an organization called FLAP  – the Fatal Light Awareness Program.

FLAP works to safeguard migratory birds in the urban environment through education, research, rescue and rehabilitation. Its vision says it all: create a 24-hour collision free urban environment for migratory birds.

It isn’t an issue most of us are aware of. But after reading this, chances are you’ll look at birds flying around office towers differently.

After collisions, many birds are just stunned and will revive in a couple of hours.  However, if they find themselves trapped in a maze of bright office towers, their chances of making it out alive are slim. Gulls, cats, crows and other predatory animals soon learn to patrol the area in search of an easy meal. As the day breaks, those birds that escape predation often panic as the city fills with people. Desperate to find cover, they collide with windows reflecting the natural surroundings, often with fatal results. If they manage to avoid further window collisions, some may slowly starve to death.

Why should we care?

Because creating a collision-free urban environment for migratory birds will have a lasting effect in helping reduce greenhouse gas & air emissions, while aid in conserving freshwater ecosystems.

And because birds are big business. According to data on FLAP’s site, birding is reportedly second only to gardening as the most rapidly growing leisure interest across North America. The number of bird-watchers in the U.S. and Canada grew 155 percent between 1983 and 1995. The Fish and Wildlife Service survey states that 62.9 million Americans participate in wildlife watching and spend $29.2 billion doing so.

Quebeckers and birding

According to PMB 2009 data, Quebeckers are slightly less likely to be actively involved in bird watching. 9% of Quebeckers went bird watching at least once in the past year compared to 11% of Canadians in the rest of Canada. But they are less likely to say they accept that ‘some environmental damage is an acceptable consequence of progress’.

There is a Montréal version of FLAP called ProjetAVES.

Bird bath

On a related note, here’s a clever spot for Dawn dishwashing liquid.

According to Brandchannel, the campaign may never have happened were it not for a charity’s persistence. The International Bird Rescue Research Center first discovered that Dawn worked on birds caught in oil spills in 1978. But Dawn’s maker, Procter & Gamble, ignored requests to donate cases of the product, then finally agreed to do so in 1988.

From 'pain in the ass' to opportunity

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Regional ad agencies usually resent being forced to handle out-of-the-way project work while bigger-market shops scoop up all the agency-of-record glory, but a coalition of agencies in Montreal is going to unusual lengths to do just that. "Being a regional market is no longer a pain in the ass," said Sebastien Faure, president of agency BleuBlancRouge. "Now it's an opportunity."

via adage.com

Here's a follow-up to my previous post about the YUL-Lab; A view from YYZ.

This item in today's AdAge essentially outlines what the 'lab' is all about: a living, breathing, marketing laboratory based on the rationale that Quebec's relative cultural isolation -- its language barrier prevents much outside media from seeping in, and vice versa -- makes it an ideal place for U.S.-based marketers to experiment with new ideas and approaches before rolling them out to wider audiences.

Glad to see the story seems to have evolved in the past few months. The lab seems to now be about Montreal as a small market where marketers can experiment rather than some kind of microcosm of North America that can act as a predictive test market.

Brand cameos

Brandchannel ranks the leading appearances by brands in films. Apple tops the list with an appearance in Michael Jackson's film This is it.

Not yet on the list is Cisco's appearance on the TV show 30 Rock last night. Now that's what I call product placement.

Not big on conversation

This blog is almost two years old, has 238 posts, had 19314 lifetime pageviews and a fair amount of comments.

The post that generated the most visits?

A post entitled ‘Playing computer games in the nude.’ The referring site most often responsible for taking visitors to this post was Google Images.

Either my other posts are not as arousing and won't ignite conversations or I should somehow embed the word ‘nude’ in each title.

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Talking about limited conversations, there's an interesting admission by Harry Rosen's Sandra Kennedy in the Globe and Mail today. Remember the 'new confidence' campaign for the retailer featuring, among others, Robert Deluce and Rob Guenette? It seems only about 1,000 people had visited the blog by the end of the campaign. I guess the word 'nude' didn't fit the strategy.

6.5 seconds before we move on.

I was introduced recently to DRAFTFCB’s litmus test for great work: 6.5 Seconds That Matter. 

Consumers give marketers 6.5 seconds to engage them. According to DRAFT FCB’s research with over 1,000 consumers, they will give you an average of only 6.5 seconds ‘to lean into and engage with a brand message. It’s a brief window of opportunity, and we may not get a second chance, so we have to make it count.’

I’m not challenging this research-based theory but I sure hope it’s not going to add to the bite size communications world we now live in. I would have Twittered this but I needed more than 6.5 seconds and 140 characters to make the point.