Canada win the Olympic Hockey Golds and Tim Hortons has a brand fail

Once you have defined your brand the next stage is ensuring you live it through your corporate culture and your external interactions with customers and stakeholders.  Consistency is key, through all channels.

When the core of your brand is Canadian pride, an event such as the gold medal game at the Olympics, for Canada’s game, hockey is a great opportunity.  Unfortunately it was an opportunity that Tim Horton’s spectacularly missed on Twitter this morning; no pictures of Canada shirt wearing employees or customers, no comparison of meatballs, pickled herring and a breakfast sandwich or Canadian Maple doughnut.

If you are not active on Twitter during this time, you are conspicuous by your near absence and lack of planning.  It wasn’t as if they didn’t know that Canada was involved in an important hockey game. And a couple of small tweets immersed in responding to client complaints not only seems like a missed opportunity but inconsistent with your brand and your position as Canada’s coffee, especially when you have aggressive competitors such as McCafe.

What should Tim Horton’s have done?

On Twitter you should follow the golden rule, four gives, one sell and one retweet. Tim Hortons could have developed a plan with some research to prepare some strong gives, and ones that might even have some sales benefits, such as link to a map of 24 hours Tim’s.  For people staying at home one can promote the single serve, designed for early morning hockey games.  The opportunity to retweet was a gift, the double double, two gold medals, men’s and ladies’ hockey gold, jumps out.

Who did a good job?

Well I’ll point you to Buzz Bishop’s blog with the Canadian Tire and IKEA exchange.  Both companies capitalised on the event, and aligned their brands with their countries of origin, and very respectfully.  I particularly liked the IKEA comment, we are from Sweden, but live in Canada, #winwin.  There was obviously some good planning, they had put experienced and trusted community managers on to cover social media and empowered them to tweet real time, relevant and engaging tweets, well done.