Holiday campaign introduces ‘Make Every Day a Great Day’
Sears Canada has unwrapped a national advertising campaign with its new “Make Every Day a Great Day” tagline and platform, just in time for the holiday season.
The department store chain’s president and CEO Calvin McDonald unveiled the new campaign Wednesday morning at an employee event at the store’s Toronto Eaton Centre location.
The campaign will roll-out through November to include a 60-second television commercial, print and radio ads developed by The Unitas Reputation Agency, which replaced BBDO Canada on the account last May.
Vizeum Canada handles media buying for Sears.
Sears is a retail destination that predominately sells “wants,” which tend to be more engaging and indulgent than consumer “needs,” which are functional, explained McDonald, a former Loblaw exec who joined Sears a little over a year ago. “If you don’t bring them to the consumer in a more differentiated engaging fashion, others will do that and you’ll lose that sale,” he said.
With this in mind, it was important to focus on happiness when creating the new brand platform, said McDonald. “The repositioning of our brand is every one of us wants to be happy, we all want to feel great about today, we all want to feel great about the lives we’re living.”
And with that, McDonald introduced the new “Make Every Day a Great Day” tagline and platform, which the retailer will use across all of its creative moving forward.
The television commercial consists of video clips, over half of which were submitted by Sears’ associates, in every day situations from little kids dancing, swimming and playing with the family dog.
Sears is also introducing a slightly altered version of its longtime logo. The blue is lighter and uses a new, customized font called Sears Social from Canada Type.
“What’s great about that font is it’s fresh and unique – we own it,” he said. “It’s going to play throughout our stores, but it’s a very refreshed updated presentation that allows us to talk in a tone that’s very updated, friendly and fresh.”
McDonald has been working on a three-year plan to turnaround the department store chain, which is perceived in the industry as outdated and unable to compete with rivals such as the soon-to-arrive Target.
Part of that strategy has involved significant store refreshes and shifting focus to what he calls “key hero categories” such as major appliances, mattresses and furniture.
McDonald has even taken a page from Loblaw’s marketing textbook with the introduction of a quarterly oversized flyer (similar in nature to the President’s Choice Insider’s Report) called the Look Report.
Check out Thursday’s Daily AM for a video Q&A with McDonald.
What do you think of Sears’ new brand platform? Is it enough to breathe new life to the tired department store chain? Post your thoughts in our comment section.
