To boost brand recognition in the GTA, Decathlon offered a $50 discount toward the purchase of a new ride to cyclists whose bike had been stolen, among other perks.

This story was originally published in the 2023 fall issue of strategy magazine. The Brands of the Year include Pizza Pizza, Molson, Goodee and Dove.

Despite boasting 1,600 stores globally, French sports retailer Decathlon had little brand recognition when it first arrived in Canada in 2018. It had to maneuver its way into a mature sporting goods market already comprised of Canadian Tire, Sport Chek and Sporting Life Group – which have hundreds of stores and a combined century’s worth of brand history – yet the company has managed to thrive.

Mary-Lou Blais, Decathlon’s director of communications, says the brand succeeded by being focused on its mission to be accessible to all – selling sports/leisure equipment and apparel that caters to budget-conscious families, with marketing that inspires active lifestyles across generations. “We’re trying to play our own game. We’re not trying to take anybody’s position, we [just] want people to move more,” she says.

“The idea is to help Canadians have access to sport,” adds Stephane Fasquel, Decathlon’s digital leader for ecommerce, communication, and marketing, touting the breadth of its merchandise that includes affordable category-spanning products from backpacks and lunchboxes to camping equipment. The company also prides itself on stocking less traditional sporting items too, like ones related to archery or ballet.  

Decathlon has 16 locations and plans to expand at a four-store-per-year clip. And it’s the retailer’s “destination stores,” where touching and using the merch is both expected and encouraged, that Faquel says has helped grow the brand. Its 63,000-square-foot space at Calgary’s Southcentre Mall boasts warehouse robots that not only expedite ecommerce orders as a micro fulfilment centre, but allows the retailer to focus more resources on customer support and its showrooms. The store, which also includes a gym and basketball court, essentially functions like a sporting goods IKEA. 

Decathlon has stayed true to its mission to be accessible to all through its “Keep It Simple” campaign.

Other Decathlon stores position themselves as “destinations” too. Its Eaton Centre location in downtown Toronto held an interactive event demonstrating its inflatable kayaks, while its Vaughan, Ontario store hosted an “intro to camping” session, inviting users en masse to try out its tents.

Decathlon has also referred to its stores, not surprisingly, as “influence zones.” And rather than blasting a new market with an ad campaign announcing each store’s opening, it selects marketing tactics and activities best suited to a store’s particular region. For example, when its Toronto Union Station concept store opened last year, the retailer tailored it to suburban commuters by offering a “connection point to seasonal services like skate sharpening and bike repair from our growing network of flagship GTA stores.”

“We wanted to test a very convenient store location… and the foot traffic is like having a billboard in downtown Toronto,” Blais says. The store is a “testing ground” as part of Decathlon’s ongoing experimentation, and Blais admits it is still tweaking the retail “recipe.” 

Despite having data to draw upon from the 60 markets in which it operates, Blais says the retailer is “still in the testing and analyzing era” when it comes to its marketing in Canada. She says outside of Quebec – the jurisdiction where it has best resonated thanks to language affinity – it is actively experimenting with different media mixes and approaches, to see what sticks where.

For example, to boost brand recognition in the GTA, Decathlon ran large billboards boasting “we’re in a league of our own to help you own your own league,” touting itself as a “new kind of sports store.” Its online and OOH-led “Play it Smart” campaign also made very basic claims about value and being “smart” about purchasing sporting equipment. In one of the ads, nothing more than a bouncing ball and a tennis racket with a conspicuous “$65” beside it was shown. 

And, while the bulk of its messaging is simple, the brand also looks for ways to be bold. For instance, in Toronto, the country’s bike theft capital, Decathlon ran a unique summer campaign that showcased its cycling products. 

Working with Rethink, it released creative of grainy surveillance footage of thieves literally making off like bandits and offered a $50 discount toward the purchase of a new ride to people who could prove their bike had been stolen. In addition, the brand devised blue cut-outs with QR codes placed in bike racks and posted ads on Facebook Marketplace and bike sharing platforms. It is one of the ways Decathlon, with support from PR agency 1Milk2Sugars, has been more public-facing in its marketing. The motivation for the campaign was acknowledging a common pain point, and showing how the retailer can help, Fasquel says. 

The bike theft campaign and “Play it Smart,” which ran concurrently, have paid major dividends. According to brand insights, 53% of survey respondents searched for Decathlon online after seeing the campaigns, with a 475% increase in engagement on its social channels. The campaigns boosted Decathlon familiarity by 12% and snagged an NPS score of +50. 

The retailer’s “Ability Signs” reimagined the International Symbol of Access.

The brand’s mission is to offer affordable products, with accessibility being a longstanding corporate value, which is also reflected in its marketing. For instance, Decathlon and Rethink’s Cannes Gold Lion-winning “Ability Signs,” inspired by the country’s 2020 Paralympic team, gained the company global recognition for a campaign that was birthed in Canada. 

The icons (which reimagined the International Symbol of Access by incorporating different sports from tennis to volleyball) earned 227 million organic impressions and it was the most shared social campaign in Decathlon’s history. This fall, the brand made the “Ability Signs” available under a Creative Commons license. 

“We hire people with physical disabilities in our stores, in our warehouse or in other teams and it’s something we did prior to [the campaign] and is being done in other parts of the world,” Blais says, noting that the accessibility messaging “is true to who we are.”