A television commercial for the Canadian doughnut-and-coffee shop Tim Hortons goes like this: a young Canuck attends the University of Glasgow, in Scotland. Although he likes it there just fine, he begins to miss home. Instead of dropping out and moving back to Canada, however, he decides to convert his dorm room into a Canadian enclave by adorning it with snowshoes, a maple-leaf statuette, and a Canadian flag hung from a hockey stick fastened to the wall. It’s not enough. “For some reason, it still didn’t feel completely Canadian yet,” he laments in a voice-over. Not one to give up, he writes a letter to Tim Hortons, which in turn sends him a huge box of coffee. The advertisement ends with a dozen students of unknown nationalities drinking freshly brewed Tim Hortons coffee in the kid’s dorm room, as harmony returns to his small corner of the cosmos.
The ad is part of Tim Hortons’s True Stories campaign, which was launched nearly two decades ago. The series relies on customers’ patriotism by positioning the Tim Hortons brand as an essential part of Canadian identity. The earliest spot features an elderly woman who walks up a hill every morning to visit her local franchise, where she’s “one of the family.” A recent installment involves an immigrant father who greets his wife and children as they emerge from behind a pair of sliding glass doors at the airport. The man hands his wife a cup of Tim Hortons coffee and says, “Welcome to Canada.”
Patricia Cormack, a sociology professor at St. Francis Xavier University, argues that Tim Hortons’s domestic marketing has been so successful that the brand has transformed itself from a mere provider of pastries into a symbol of national pride, akin to the Tragically Hip and socialized health care. While not everyone appreciates the strategy of appropriating Canadian culture—“I find it as cheap and disingenuous as putting a naked woman on a product,” someone complained on Reddit not long ago—a recent Ipsos Reid survey found that Tim Hortons ranked sixth on a list of the most influential brands in Canada, and was the top-ranked Canadian brand. According to Robert Carter, an executive director at the NPD Group, a market-research firm, Tim Hortons, which also offers soups, sandwiches, and other lunch-friendly fare, has more customer traffic—that is, a higher number of people making purchases—than the next fifteen fast-food chains in Canada combined. Carter told me that the company also sells nearly eight out of every ten cups of coffee purchased in quick-serve restaurants in Canada.
But this has not translated well south of the border. Tim Hortons, which was co-founded in 1964 by Jim Charade and a popular Canadian hockey player named Tim Horton, opened its first American outpost in 1984 and gained some exposure by merging with Wendy’s from 1995 until 2006, but has struggled to cultivate loyalty in the U.S. In 2008, the franchise closed about a dozen U.S. locations. Two years later, it closed fifty-four more. “We’ve not had that kind of experience before,” the C.E.O. at the time, Don Schroeder, admitted.
One problem is that, in the United States, big chains such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts dominate. Taco Bell is also getting serious about breakfast. Furthermore, sales at fast-food restaurants aren’t growing much, so the only way a company can acquire a lot of customers is by stealing them from rivals—and Tim Hortons doesn’t have enough brand recognition for that.
In the mid-aughts, Tim Hortons attempted to appeal to American curiosity with an ad campaign known as 15 Million Canadians—a number meant to imply that about half of Canada’s population visits a Tim Hortons each week, according to the company. One ad claimed that, every year, the franchise receives several inquiries from Canadians hoping to get married at a nearby branch. Another declared that a man from Ottawa, before he died, requested that his funeral procession pass through a Tim Hortons drive-thru on its way to the cemetery. The ads, however, did little to entice. “We did try the Canadian angle, and it failed, because Americans showed zero interest in what Canadians like,” Brynn Burton, a spokeswoman, said.
Tim Hortons executives changed their tactics. From 2008 to 2013, the U.S. division made efforts to “establish brand identity” and “drive awareness,” among other steps, according to a document from a recent investor meeting held in New York City. In 2010, the company changed the name of its U.S. locations from Tim Hortons to Tim Hortons Cafe & Bake Shop—the goal being to attract individuals who hadn’t entered the restaurant before because they didn’t quite understand what it was.
A recent Tim Hortons TV commercial intended for American audiences cycles through images of breakfast sandwiches, coffee, and hash browns while stressing the freshness of each item. It ends with the slogan “Great Tasting Breakfast. Amazing Coffee.” Another ad highlights the thickness of Tim Hortons bacon. The tone is different from what Tim Hortons tends to broadcast back home. It’s neither tender nor community-oriented nor all that memorable. Not a single human being appears. “In Canada, our ads tend to be a little bit less pretentious,” Michel Meilleur, the executive vice-president of Tim Hortons U.S.A., told me.
Tim Hortons plans to expand in Canada, aware that Canucks can consume only so many Timbits (small, spherical doughnuts) and double-doubles (one coffee with two creams and two sugars). Future prosperity, executives know, lies to the south, because America’s Midwest and Northeast regions—markets already penetrated by more than eight hundred and fifty Tim Hortons locations—together contain more than three times the population of Canada. Plus, McDonald’s has begun encroaching on Tim Hortons’s home turf: In the past five years, it has more than doubled its share of Canada’s out-of-home coffee market, to more than ten per cent.
Meilleur said that the new approach to U.S. advertising has worked: “People know the brand and they know where we’re located, which in turn should continue to drive not just trial but also repeat visits.” Still, last year the American segment made less than one per cent of what the company made up north, suggesting that there’s reason to remain skeptical.
Then again, Tim Hortons is facing a somewhat unprecedented situation. Other brands that have thoroughly identified as Canadian, such as the pale lager Molson Canadian and the retailer Canadian Tire, have never aggressively pursued the American market. There is, however, at least one company that has benefitted from promoting its Canadian character abroad. Harold J. Simpkins, a marketing professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, told me about Canada Goose, a maker of heavy-duty winter clothing. The company features a maple-leaf-embroidered logo and manufactures its parkas in Canada, yet still has managed to expand to more than forty countries, including the U.S., and saw sales rise exponentially over the past decade. In that case, the brand’s Canadian roots have built trust in the company’s products—because, if Canada is known for one thing, it’s for being cold. Kate Upton wore little more than a single Canada Goose jacket while she was on set in Antarctica for last year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. When it comes to doughnuts and coffee, though, Simpkins asked, “What does Canada have to do with that?”
Paul Hiebert, a freelance writer living in New York City, has written for Slate, The Awl, and Pacific Standard.
Photograph by Robert Wagenhoffer/Corbis.
