Our bookshelves are groaning under the weight of learned tomes on branding. Every guru has her/his insightful prescription for brand-led nirvana. However, there’s one section of our library that stands woefully empty. Branding in Canada, wherefore art thou?

Branding? Canada? Is it different? Should we care?

Yes, on both counts. You should care if you have anything to do with shaping or managing a brand that operates in, or from, Canada.

The differences are subtle but very real. Businesses ignore them at their peril. The Canadian zeitgeist can impact the way organizations align ideas and actions internally. And in free-trade markets, indigenous brands need to exploit every home-grown advantage.

Branding in this country is a unique beast because of several factors:

* we emphasize intrinsic over extrinsic values

* we value community over the individual

* we promote diversity

What’s bred in the bone

Brands are, essentially, all about values. Cultural values are so much a part of our environment that we hardly notice them. But they shape our world view nonetheless.

There are endless PhD theses on the psycho-social mores of those living north of the 49th parallel. However, Michael Adam’s crisply written books, Sex in the Snow and Better Happy Than Rich, provide a coolly detached market researcher’s perspective on what makes Canadians tick. ‘This is the country that celebrates and lives diversity, like no other place on earth,’ Adams writes.

‘We are becoming,’ Adams argues, ‘a post-modern people…seeing vitality – the ability to experience lives of energy and intensity in a more ethical world – as the most desirable end in our society.’ Compared to Americans, Adams argues, the majority in this country are more oriented to intrinsic versus extrinsic values. That translates into a bias that values experience over things, communal good over individual needs.

It’s interesting to consider how that intrinsic/extrinsic insight plays out in brand strategies across different categories.

Coffee is a hot example. We are all conditioned by now that plunking down several dollars for a steaming latte or mochachino is fair value and the caffeine emporiums continue to proliferate.

Yet after many years, the market is still dominated by Second Cup (a client of ours) and Seattle-based Starbucks. Both inspire strong passions in aficionados. Both organizations have been extremely successful. Starbucks has been a juggernaut in many markets in the U.S. and abroad, bringing its own tall/skinny/grande lexicon with it.

But Second Cup is the number-one specialty coffee retailer in Canada.

Why is that?

Starbucks is positioned as a lifestyle destination in and of itself, whole and complete. Second Cup, on the other hand, takes on the mantle of a communal destination, adapting more overtly to reflect its locale. It burrows into its neighborhood, in part, because of its franchise structure but also based on a corporate philosophy where quality, consistency and diversity are compatible concepts.

The differences in brand management philosophies are obvious even before you step over a threshold. Just drive around Toronto and note Second Cup’s adaptability. For example, the exterior of the Church Street location in the heart of the gay community welcomes its local brethren quite differently from the Second Cup that serves Beaches locals in the city’s east end. Yet both fit comfortably within the Second Cup brand image.

Tim Hortons is another retail brand that plays its just-one-of-us community card particularly well. For a nation of donut lovers, we may flirt with the exotic allure of Krispy Kreme, but we come home to ‘Timmy’s’ in the end.

The global villagers

Although it’s so trumpeted that it becomes a cliché, Canada’s multicultural, multilingual realities do shape our brand mentality. We understand that one size rarely fits all. That makes some Canadian brands particularly adept at traveling overseas and adapting to new environments. To illustrate, look at SFP client Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, which is now operating close to 60 properties in 30 countries.

While offering deluxe accommodation, Four Seasons’ biggest point of differentiation, as any brand loyalist will tell you, is its service ethos. Its intrinsic service values are based on the golden rule: Do for others what you would want them to do for you. The Four Seasons sense of luxury is a Canadian one, steeped in experiences of wellbeing, not just things.

Successful Canadian brands have to be hardworking and versatile in our small, but diverse, market at home. Like Europeans, we’ve also learned that being nimble and adaptable are critical survival attributes for branders in free-market economies. Isn’t it time we started looking hard at the uniquely Canadian DNA that fuels our own great brands? There’s certainly much more we can learn from others, but we’d also be wise to start filling up that empty bookshelf with insights into what makes our homegrown success stories so compelling.

Jeannette Hanna is VP, Brand Strategy at Spencer Francey Peters in Toronto. She can be reached at jhanna@ sfpinc.com.