Objective

Delivery services rose to prominence during the pandemic, with established brands like Canada Post, FedEx and UPS leading the way. Purolator, while operating in Canada for almost 60 years, was a fourth player.

It was important to improve awareness among Shippers, primarily among small and medium-sized businesses. They pave the path to us getting every Canadian household to recognize us, too.

This campaign set out to:

• Beat the industry average in digital ad recall. We are outspent by our competitors, so the assets need to really cut through and be memorable. We cannot afford to be glossed over.  
• Increase Brand Interest. We aimed to motivate people to do something, and that means making them interested in Purolator and consider it for their shipping needs.

Strategy

Our main competitors focused on rational messages – their timeliness, reliability, global reach. It came across as clinical, transactional. We saw this as an opportunity to set ourselves apart. Differentiation was demonstrated via (1) an insightful big idea, (2) the tone and language, and (3) visualizing our friendly, helpful personality.

1. The big idea: Let’s Start A Relation-Ship

As the idea suggests, our stories centered on our understanding of how important every package is to our entrepreneur-clients. We want them to feel that we care about them as much as they do. And we punctuated it with our line, “Promises delivered”.

2. Tone and Language

As we’re spotlighting human relationships, our language and tone were inspired by romantic comedy films. We deemed it important to balance our sense of professionalism with levity.

We also thought it was important to create for the digital platforms we were in.

1. Videos are storytellers, and we created 3 pithy ones (“Heart”, “Ball Drop” and “Time Sensitive”, each 15secs long) that show how Purolator understood its clients’ shipping needs.
2. Our digital banners will be out there with all brands targeting businesspeople, so we led with our action-inciting line “Let’s start a relation-ship” together with a relevant Purolator service.
3. Social media is now common for reviews, and so we put a twist to our testimonial ads.

3. Visualizing Our Friendly, Helpful Personality

        That same balance of professionalism and levity had to translate visually too. So, our design used striking pastels to catch          the eye, matched with bold and strong fonts. Overall, a major departure from the serious and corporate approach of
         FedEx, UPS and Canada Post.

Results

“Let’s Start A Relation-Ship” made significant strides for Purolator in the ways we intended it, data that was established by both third-party research among Canadian parcel shippers, and media performance.

Beat the industry average in digital ad recall.

(Significant positive impact is established when the score is more than 5% above average.)

• The digital banners beat the industry average by 16 percentage-points
• The social media ads overtook the benchmark by 12 percentage-points
• The 3 videos surpassed the industry average by roughly 8 percentage-points

Of the 3 videos, “Heart” stood out as a top performer.

• In the 3rd-party research, 56% said “Purolator can be trusted to keep its promises”, a score that beat the average by 14 percentage points
• Media performance-wise, 88% (or 1.5M viewers) watching the video until the end. Industry benchmarks for video completion is in the 75%-85% range.

Increase brand interest.

The consumer survey also showed that all three videos performed above-average in increasing interest for Purolator, and making shippers want to use the brand.

• Scores on “Increased interest for the brand”: as high as 23 percentage-points above average.
• Scores on “Made me want to use the brand”: as high as 33 percentage-points above average.

Media performance data confirms this success in-market. Efficient cost per clicks exceeded the goal by 74% and overachieved goals by 200%.

Media