Branding Canada: Q&A with Roots’ James Connell

Image via strategyonline.ca

Roots is an iconic Canadian company but your image is, well, rootsy. How do you bring that sense of heritage and authenticity to the web? 

For us, it’s all about trying to use organic colours and elements, as well as trying to be very authentic. Also, in an artificial space, sometimes the authenticity you get is the way you interact with people.

For example, you’ll see us put our initials on the end of each Facebook post so that people know they’re talking to a real person.

With two blogs and an active presence on Twitter and Facebook you seem committed to content. What’s your goal when it comes to creating content?

Generally, it’s to educate our customers, not only about our products, but also about some of the things we believe in.

To a lot of people outside this country, we’re a real cultural curator about what’s cool and what’s going on in Canada, so we take that role seriously.

For example, we try to find emerging artists to feature in our campaign videos. As a result, some of the artists have been listed on iTunes based on the demands from our customers.

In a 2007 interview you were asked what social media tools work best. You said that your biggest success has come from “going out to user groups that have an affinity to the same causes and interests that we do.” Five years later would you say the same thing?

I’d say we have really migrated to be a dominant Facebook shop. We have an audience of over 50,000 people who are highly engaged. We try not to incentivize them too much; we don’t want them to join to get some free gift and then drop off. For us, it’s not really about the overall numbers, it’s about engagement.

We have also started to invest a lot in video. We’re doing video outreach to bloggers as well as media with our campaign videos. In a lot of our videos we try to showcase a place as well as the clothing, because it sort of goes back to our affinity to Canada.

There are a ton of incredible places that Canadians have never visited, so our ability to work with organizations like Travel Alberta, B.C. Tourism, or Newfoundland Tourism gets people, not only domestically but also internationally, excited about a place in Canada that they might be interested in visiting.

Roots is big into endorsements, partnerships, and event sponsorships. Do you think these real-world relationships are still as important in the digital age as they used to be?

I do. Especially when you’re looking for mass TV coverage and engagement, really for network television, live events are where it’s at.

We’ve also found that associating yourself with another brand engages that secondary audience. For example, we did something with Right To Play, which is a charity that works with kids around the world.

Having that secondary affiliation promotes a bit of an educated consumerism. People feel good about the products they’re buying and really feel like they’re contributing.

When it comes to your e-commerce channels, who are you trying to reach?

Well, we don’t really target a place necessarily, we target a type of person, and that person can be located anywhere in the world.

We’ve looked at our store footprint around the world as well as the people who have the same climate as we do and who share a lot of the same values. Because our seasons are reversed, we have a harder time selling goods to South America than we do to the North Eastern U.S. or Europe.

Then again, it could be a way that you’re promoting your product. For example, in Australia, we’ve seen incredible success because we’re more heavily promoting our leather goods as well as our footwear, and that’s seasonless.

Do you think more Canadian online retail businesses should be thinking globally from day one?

I think it’s an excellent idea. I was speaking at a conference in Australia in November, and it was interesting because they’re having the same situation where there’s a set of online retailers who view the world as their competition set, and those were the sites that were incredibly successful.

The sites that were having challenges were those that were thinking they were only competing with the store down the street or other Australian websites.

We really need to look at the world as our stage where we can connect with consumers globally.