Tim Hortons: Food Celebration

Tim Hortons, a world-renowned Canadian food and beverage brand, began its first footprint in the South East Asia market in Bangkok, Thailand. The campaign was to create awareness of the brand in the highly competitive Thai market. Thais knew very little about the brand and its history. It was one of the .challenges; to introduce local to the brand, followed by exciting the market about Tim Hortons’ product, especially their hero products such as coffee and Timbits.

Pre Launch
To introduce the brand to the Thai audiences, we dig deep to find its core as it was the first store in Thailand and the region. So we brainstormed and thoroughly researched what would make local and the brand connected. We took the brand’s core as the starting point and found a linkage with Thai audiences. As a result, the nation’s heritage and root’s proudness were the first ties between both countries and its citizens, with many characteristics shared in common: kindness, national sports, unique cuisine, the importance of the family institution, diversity, and openness.

Strategy
The campaign direction formed by the similarities of both nations. Hence, in the first phase, we developed a strategy to create a relation between Thais and the brand through value and similarities to educate the brand’s value and identity to Thai audiences by presenting the brand as a person ‘Uncle Tim’ as a brand representation of an uncle from Canada who comes to Thailand first time via plane. The first content ‘trip from Canada to Thailand’ piece was the beginning of uncle Tom’s trip from Canada and landed in Bangkok. After Uncle Tom landed, he was the usual traveller, and obviously, he also brought his products with him.
His first time in Thailand, with his open-minded and humble, he travelled around Bangkok and experienced Thai cultures and a loving atmosphere. He began to connect the dots between his origin, his product and Thailand. In the end, he decided to establish Tim Hortons in Bangkok.

Brand Launch
As of the first phase, we highlighted the well known ‘Original Red Cup’ to create a brand recaller. In the launch phase, we promote other hero products to get audiences to see that we have a wide range of products that are ready to be served and the uniqueness of Tim Hortons’ products brought with the brand to the market. The creative assets created around the playful and lively aspects of Timbits, doughnuts, and other coffee menus, gave the brand an enjoyable, easy-going, down-to-earth tone.

Brand Showcase
After the brand launch, the creative contents shifted to product showcase to support the physical store’s conversion. Hence, the content gave an overall picture of the wide range of product served at the store. The direction was paring products with audience insight we got in the previous phase to chart the potential customers who likely to come together or draw them to another product they might like beside the one they already interacted with before.

We also approached other potential customers who craved smoothies, a sweet tooth, and healthy-concern which mostly are female audience in their 20s by lively stop-motion of drinks made with raw ingredients to the actual product and the variety of smoothies matcha, strawberry and mango intending to make it shareable so these group of audience who likely to share to their friends.

Together @ Tim Hortons
This phase’s last set emphasised togetherness and down-to-earth, which adopted the brand core value used more human interaction in the visual assets and in-action shots to impersonate the brand’s approachable, down-to-earth aspect.