Company

Canadian Tire

Property

Trees Ontario

Background Wakeham & Associates Marketing, Inc. was retained by Trees Ontario to find corporate partners to underwrite tree planting initiatives in Ontario. Trees Ontario is the largest organization in North America in terms of number of trees planted annually, and is the province of Ontario’s designated agency to manage and fulfil its commitment to planting 50 million trees by 2020. This commitment is the largest in the world as part of the United Nations’ global tree planting challenge.

Objectives

• To maximize potential revenue from corporations to underwrite tree planting initiatives.
• To generate profile for Trees Ontario and its tree planting mandate.
• To engage the public in the tree planting issue.

Challenges

• Trees Ontario has a province-wide mandate only, whereas most corporate marketers seek a national platform for their initiatives.
• Trees Ontario does not have a media budget, and therefore cannot generate broad exposure for its corporate partners

Strategies

• Reached out to Tree Canada – a small but national tree planting agency – and entered into an agreement to represent them as a Trees Ontario partner. Revenue sharing would be on a pro rata basis according to the numbers of trees planted in each region of the country (NOTE: 80% of trees planted by tree planting agencies occur in Ontario). This allowed Trees Ontario to offer corporate partners a national platform.
• Approached major national retailers that were marketing ‘green’ products. Proposed a program whereby with each purchase of a selected green product, the retailer would fund the planting of one tree in the region of the country where that product was purchased.
• Proposed that the retailer promote this offer as a way to incentivize sales of the product, and to build profile for Trees Ontario (and Tree Canada).

Results

• Secured a national agreement with Canadian Tire pertaining to the launch of their ‘Blue Planet’ line of ‘green’ products.
• Launched a national one-month promotional campaign whereby Canadian Tire funded the planting of one tree with the sale of each package of Blue Planet light bulbs nationally.
• Canadian Tire created a national multi-million dollar TV and print campaign promoting the program (500 GRPs purchased)
• Canadian Tire created significant point of sale materials for placement in all of its thousands of stores nationally creating exposure for the program and for Trees Ontario
• Canadian Tire produced a ‘Going Green’ newsletter for distribution nationally, including details about the program and Trees Ontario
• Canadian Tire paid Trees Ontario a fee of $2.00 for every package of bulbs sold (up to a maximum of $250,000).
• Over 220,000 packages of Canadian Tire’s Blue Planet light bulbs were sold during the promotion period.
• At the end of the promotion, Canadian Tire was thrilled with the results, and renewed an agreement with Trees Ontario to conduct a similar promotion in Spring, 2009.