Early this month, Sears Canada released a new spot with two stars – the actor Mike Myers and his considerably less famous brother, Peter.
The comedic crux of the ad is that Myers has swooped in to lend a hand to his brother, a Sears employee, and convince customers Sears isn’t going out of business. But the plot’s more than comedy. It’s also a completely true story.
According to Salim Maherali, senior vice-president of omni channel at Sears, Peter really is Myers’ brother, and he’s also a longtime Sears employee.
It was Peter who brought the idea to management, Maherali said, selling it as “family helping family,” a notion the executive suite thought would resonate with the retailer’s target demographic, middle class families.
Myers signed on this summer and connected Sears with Bryan Buckley, a director who has shot ads for Pepsi, Bud Light and Audi and has more than 40 Super Bowl spots under his belt. The actor even had a hand in writing the script.
As for payment, Vincent Power, vice-president of corporate affairs and communications at Sears Canada, declined to comment on Myers’ compensation, saying only, “Mike was very pleased to help out.”
Maherali said the spot was designed with its associates in mind as its core audience. He said employees were being asked questions about the future of Sears and management wanted to arm them with something that said: “No, Sears isn’t going anywhere.”
Before putting any paid media behind the ad, Maherali said Sears shared it with its 20,000 associates internally. He said this initial organic push was the main driver behind the spot’s success.
Two days later, the brand purchased YouTube pre-roll, but Maherali said the spend was “relatively small,” and that much of the ad’s 1.4 million views were achieved organically.
Addressing the elephant in the room
Throughout 2014, the PR team at Sears Canada faced headlines like, “Sears’ final days” and “Does Sears have a future in Canada?”
But not without cause. Sears closed out its fiscal third quarter last week with $118.7 million in net loss, more than double its 2013 loss in the same quarter, as well as a dip in same-store sales and total revenue.
All that said, Power maintains the situation at Sears isn’t as dire as the media suggests. He said the brand had been looking for a way to respond to the “elephant in the room” when Peter brought Mike to the table.
“We wanted to have some fun, to do something different that Sears hadn’t done before,” Powers said. “We said, ‘Let’s lay the cards on the table in the video.’”
“A lot of those characteristics, I’d say are unlike what people would expect from Sears, including our own associates. We wanted it to be a bit of a shocker, a motivator.”
The way forward for Sears is straight down the middle
In October, Ronald Boire, a senior executive from the Sears Holding Corporation in the U.S., was selected as president and CEO of Sears Canada.
Boire’s plan, according to Power, is to drive home value-for-cost messaging to middle class Canadians.
“Some people trade solely on price, some people trade with high end brands. [Boire] really believes that position in the middle with a value story is where we want to go,” he said.
Power said Sears sees the middle class as more of a sensibility than a firm group dictated by income. The plan for Sears, he said, is to deliver “great quality at reasonable prices” and occupy the middle space between luxury retailers and discount chains.
That’s nothing new for Sears – middle class families have long been the retailer’s bread and butter. There are however, other big changes ahead at Sears. Power said the retailer is adapting to how its customers want to shop by investing more heavily in ecommerce and speaking to them in new ways, like social media (the Mike Myers spot was socially focused, with no TV buy).
It’s also refreshing its website next spring, as part of a two years process of updating all its systems.
