Tim Hortons Marketing Mix

1.2.4 Promotion

The promotional mix is a collection of advertising, selling and public relations. In standardised promotional mix, the basic communication strategy is adopted globally to increase efficiency, reduce costs and provide consumers with perceived added value from familiar representations.

Adaptation is the best strategy due to differences between the countries. The cultural environment plays an important role during the communication between the brand sellers and with the end customers. There was a case involving Tim Hortons when the same advert was used for English and French speaking Canadians. The language was in English and for the Francophone region, subtitles were added. It was unsuccessful until it as adapted by using French-speaking

The Saudi Arabia flag which a holy verse depicted on it was on the cap. Muslims reacted negatively as the holy verse was being associated with alcohol. Heineken recalled the product and the promotion was halted (GlobalMarketingProfessor.com, 2014).

When companies go international, money and time must be invested in conducting proper research to prevent these kind of mishaps.

For our promotional mix of Tim Hortons in France, it will be mostly adapted for the French market demand except the brand name which will be kept the same. The rationale behind brand standardisation is that since in Canada, in the Francophone region the brand name was kept the same and there were no issues, there should be no language issues in France.

Two reports from Syndicat des Régies Internet and PricewaterhouseCoopers, have shown that in France, the money spent on media advertising has increased 29.6% last year, surpassing that of Television and resulting in a drop in advertisement spending on traditional media channels such as print and

To aid the company, in the content of its adverts, a French consulting firm specialized in trade promotion and advertising will be used. Moreover the agency will have knowledge on the current legal requirements which are currently in place. It was noted during the market research that the French government has been actively amending and introducing new laws regarding advertisements, how they are carried out and their content (CBC news, 2007; O' Reilly, 2017).

1.3 Conclusion

In this section of the report both strategies (standardisation and adaptation) were evaluated and it resulted that mostly Tim Hortons will have to adapt its marketing mix for the French Market.

Culture and customers are differentiated, meaning that when entering new markets, cultural differences have to be taken into consideration and different ways of operating have to be found leading to adaptation in the marketing mix. Hofstede’s cultural dimensional model is a good model that can be used when developing the marketing mix in order to see how the customers would most likely