Sport Chek is recognizing both high-performance and casual athletes in its latest campaign, as it celebrates the Olympics and the power of sports to unite people.
The campaign, “Say It With Sport,” highlights key categories for the brand, such as swimming, running and team sports. It features Paralympian Marissa Papaconstantinou, swimmer Maggie Mac Neil and basketball player Natalie Achonwa, interspersed with everyday people completing exercise regimens.
“We wanted to ensure we were conveying the shared experience that sport provides to Canadians, and the joy and power we get from practicing sport at any level,” says Stephanie Wall, Sport Chek’s VP of marketing. “Sport tells the world what we’re made of and enables us to connect with one another through this shared experience.”
The spot comes complete with the retailer’s brand mark or “super Chek,” which Wall calls a critical part of its brand design system and which was intentionally featured in the campaign to ensure brand attribution.
“Sport is in our DNA. It’s in our name and it’s a core value of our brand and of our customers,” Wall says. “In a key timeframe for sport in Canada, it is very important to ensure that Canadian’s know it is coming from us.”
Sport Chek has been the official sporting goods retailer for Team Canada since 2013.
Earlier this year, Sport Chek put an emphasis on selfcare and unapologetically pushing customers to invest in themselves. As Wall explains, through 2023, Sport Chek has developed its storytelling to describe sports as a language and the brand is continuing this into 2024 through “Say it with Sport.”
Wall says that leaning into this idea of sports as a universal language allowed the brand to celebrate sports and athletes generally, in a way that felt ownable to the brand.
The 360 campaign includes full extensions across TV, digital, social, CBC and owned channels, in-store and via email. The digital media mix includes CBC, YT, DV360 (Sportsnet, Spotify, Samsung and The Score), Team Snap, Meta and TikTok.
The campaign, by agency partner Cartier, will run throughout the Olympic Games until August 11, and through the Paralympic Games from August 28 to September 8. Touché and Canadian Tire’s internal team are handling the media buy.
The spend was consistent with the retailer’s Olympic investments in recent years.
