2020 Winner
2020 Winners
London Drugs
Cards for All
Every year, an estimated 40 million cards are exchanged in Canada for Valentine’s Day, making it a highly competitive holiday for large retailers. London Drugs is a Western Canadian retailer predominantly known as a drugstore, but they also carry a wide array of items including seasonal products like Valentine’s Day cards. In a highly competitive retail category, it was important for London Drugs to find an opportunity to differentiate themselves from larger multinational competitors.
Insights & Strategy
British Columbia, where the majority of London Drugs stores reside, prides itself as being one of the most ethnically diverse provinces in the country, and according to a Neilsen report has the second largest percentage of self-identifying LGBT households in Canada. Yet Valentine’s Day cards typically represent hetero-normative relationships and do not reflect the diversity that exists in the community. The lack of representation in the card aisle has been brought to light in media across the world, from articles in TIME, the Independent and Slate calling on retailers to diversify, stating that “greeting cards are a microcosm for our culture. The selection on the drugstore shelves represents the moments we’ve more or less agreed as a society are worth remembering.”
This gap in the card aisle presented Rethink with the perfect opportunity: the agency could demonstrate London Drugs’ shared values with customers by creating a line of cards where everyone can feel the love. The objective of the initiative was three-fold: to increase market share for London Drugs during Valentine’s Day by bringing customers in store, increase positive brand sentiment and increase long-term brand affinity.
Execution
The Cards for All initiative was a new program for London Drugs that launched on February 7, 2020. The collection was made up of 31 unique card designs, that were made for everyone to share love regardless of their sexual orientation, language, or makeup of their relationship. There were cards for those who identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, as well as cards for platonic relationships like for a co-worker or an adopted child. There were also designs in Chinese, Farsi, Punjabi, Salish, and Tagalog–the most common languages in Western Canada outside of English and French–cards were even offered in Braille.
One of the challenges at the outset of the project was to make sure that London Drugs represented, rather than spoke for the communities they were addressing. It was critical to show up in an authentic and credible way, so the agency worked with illustrators who were part of the community they designed the card for. Each card design was a visual expression tailored to that relationship, culture or form of love and was informed by the designer. For example having an illustration of two men kissing on the card that said “The best husband a guy could ever have”, or being aware of the subtleties in Punjabi culture, where the illustrator integrated the two scripts (Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi) in his approach to typography.
While it was important for each card to be as unique as the illustrators themselves, the agency needed to clearly show the 31 cards as a collection. To address this, artists were given a consistent colour palette and font for the headline and the rest was up to them. What the agency ended up with was a collection of cards that each had their own story and authentically spoke to the community and artist, but overall felt in family.
The designers were also key influencers, sharing the initiative and the stories behind their designs on their social media channels, providing further credibility to interested audiences.
Results & Impact:
The Cards for All campaign was picked up by 116 publications across Canada, particularly in the 4 Western Canadian provinces where London Drugs has store locations. Stories included, TV, radio and online articles. The design behind each card was a key driver to press pick up, with many publications including interviews with the designers on the stories behind their individual cards. Digital-first publications who reached the target millennial audience referred to it as a “Super-Woke Collection of Valentine's Cards” and “cliche-breaking” and traditional media talked about how this was a first for some seeing “a big-box store to sell inclusive cards”.
The program garnered a signifiant free media coverage and helped pickup greeting card sales for London Drugs in a category that saw industry wide market share decline.