Article content continued

We came to the realization that over the past year or two, which in the digital world is a long time, our retail sales were strained as we let our fountaintire.com experience fall behind our competitors

That’s exactly what Edmonton-based Fountain Tire is doing to great effect. About a year ago, the national tire retailer and auto service provider decided to beef up its digital presence after its longtime advertising agency was purchased by a digital agency. The move gave the company time to re-examine its overall marketing program and to fully integrate its efforts.

“To that time, we were probably 70% of the way there, says Brent Hesje, CEO of Fountain Tire. “We came to the realization that over the past year or two, which in the digital world is a long time, our retail sales were strained as we let our fountaintire.com experience fall behind our competitors. We are taking steps to refresh and integrate it with the rest of our brand properties. We’ve done a good job in TV and radio with the branding so it became easy to rest on our laurels. There has been a real awakening for us to continue to use those mediums but not in isolation. There are too many risks to do that.”

For example, if advertising and digital are working independently, it’s easy for groups to take conflicting approaches that could lead to inefficiency and mixed messages. “This can be expensive and cause confusion both to the consumers and the operators in the field,” says Mr. Hesje. “We have to work at making sure the people that interface with the customer are aware of all the ways we are trying to drive demand into their stores. We can’t have the people at the counter or the service truck operators surprised with any of the media, branding or offers our customers have received. We started to see the consequences of working in isolation and had they played out longer, it would have led to poor service delivery, slower execution, customer irritation, higher marketing costs and lower margins. I don’t see any upside to having marketing functions operate independently.”

Fountain Tire is already enjoying improved results by taking a more harmonized approach to marketing. “Integrating print, social, mobile, TV, web and PR has created a higher level of scrutiny on whether they are returning the results we expect, which reinforces the need to collaborate and innovate. As we learn more about each segment we can measure and quantify ROI on a digital offering versus the value of PR. We can see which customer segment represents the higher rate of users of coupons and that allows us to be more targeted. Integrating allows us to prioritize.”