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May 5, 2003 - Strategy Magazine
Special Report: Marketing in Quebec

When to spend in Quebec
Major advertisers look beyond the bottom line when calculating ROI

by Sara Minogue
page 19

Part instinct, part ambition, part facts and figures... Making the move into la belle province is often a bold experiment. Marketers have been successful in Quebec for all kinds of reasons, but there are no hard and fast rules for determining the right strategy for your brand. And as always, the first step is the hardest; justifying the expense to your client (or your boss) when you can't prove that you'll see a return on that investment. What to do?

"The principles are no different than any other investment you would make," says Mike Welling, VP brand development for foods at Unilever Canada in Toronto. "The idea for most national manufacturers is to try and retain a common brand nationally but there are some differences in the Quebec marketplace. You ask yourself what's the added value you would get out of producing separate creative and you decide, based upon your own consumer learning and understanding, whether or not that communication is working effectively. If it's not, then it really comes back to what your business ambitions are in terms of growth of profitability."

With 24% of Canada's population, and higher consumer spending per capita, there's little doubt that Quebec represents an important market. Nonetheless, determining just how much money to devote to a Quebec advertising budget can't be based on facts and figures alone.

"You say to yourself, 'I have an ambition to achieve something; what's likely to be the most successful way of delivering on that? and what's the cost of that going to be?' Then you decide, 'I'm willing to take that risk or I'm not willing to take that risk,'" says Welling.

Small companies can do it

For some categories, the potential for economic returns is obvious. Jim Eagles is the marketing director for Moosehead Breweries in St. John, N.B. Moosehead made their first incursion into the Quebec market last October.

"In our case, Quebec's beer industry is the second largest market in Canada," Eagles says. "There's higher per capita consumption, and [the population is of] enough size that it's viable to support in a unique way."

Moosehead worked with Montreal agency Armada to produce out-of-home advertising for the product launch. Eagles is presently working on another billboard campaign that will roll out in early June. He reports that Moosehead achieves "no economic synergies" with its Quebec advertising, and relies instead on an entirely different infrastructure to produce the work, research the consumer and test the creative, in effect doubling the company's marketing budget.

"The beer market is a large volume market and the economics are there," Eagles says. But he also points out that the decision to produce unique advertising is not something the company looks at as "economically justifiable." The real reason for the expenditure is that "you just can't say something from the point of view of an Anglo-Canadian consumer to a Quebec consumer and say anything that's relevant."

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