2021 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Objectives & Challenges

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. This meant that retailers, including Sport Chek, had one less week to make their sales during the critical moment of the year.

Insight & Strategy

Although consumers love the deep discounts that Black Friday has to offer, the actual shopping moment is in fact quite annoying. Among others, there are 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’ website crashes during key shopping moments and various shipping as well as returning issues are very common.

In today’s digital age, consumers are more and more vocal about these frustrations and they do not hesitate to voice their negative experiences on various social media platforms.

Acknowledging this consumer state of mind, the team built a solution to make the shopping experience easier for consumers, by tuning into the signals that they were sending the brand in real time. It 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.

Execution

The company opened its ears to consumers' shopping experience in many different ways.

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

Using TweeterDeck, a social listening tool, the team realized that the Footlocker website was down and the Lululemon check out process was down. Therefore, it created an ad that invited those customers to Sport Chek’s website, eliminating their pain point.

Using the same TweeterDeck tool, the brand realized that people were complaining about Wal-Mart overselling, then cancelling orders for Apple Watches. Therefore, it created an ad promoting the Apple Watches inventory still available at Sport Chek.

The strategy was simple: zero in on a consumer pain point, match it with a Sport Chek offer and push that offer to market, in a real-time manner.

Results

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, and drove a 44% increase in sessions on site.

Credits

Touché!
Sport Chek