In the coming days, strategy will continue revealing the 2025 Marketers of the Year. Check back here every day for profiles on the brand leaders, featuring today’s on Metro’s Alain Tadros and others including Skip’s Rachel MacAdam and OLG’s Maxine Chapman. This article was previously featured in the Winter 2025 issue of Strategy Magazine.

By Ty Burke

For Alain Tadros, marketing is a team sport.

In 2024, the VP, CMO, digital strategy at Metro was tasked with leading the Ontario launch of Moi, the company’s loyalty program. It extends across the Montreal-headquartered grocery and pharmacy retailer’s five banners and uses customer data to provide personalized recommendations to shoppers at Metro, Food Basics and Super C grocery stores, as well as Jean Coutu pharmacies and Première Moisson, a chain of artisanal bakeries. It’s the kind of endeavour that requires all hands on deck

“Metro only has stores in three provinces, so we knew we would never be the largest loyalty program in the country,” says Tadros. “But we wanted to set ourselves apart by being the most personalized one.”

Achieving that goal would require buy-in from the entire org. Data and analytics teams provide actionable insights from the anonymized information that’s collected via Moi, which stores then integrate in their operations. “For a company like Metro, our stores are our most important media. Across our different banners, more than 10 million people already walk through our doors each week,” says Tadros.

“We could invest millions in TV advertising, and still reach fewer people than we do at our stores. Our loyalty program will fail if our stores do not support it. So, when we talk about our team, it includes everyone in the company, from store operators to the people who put together our weekly merchandising programs, through to digital and IT.”

The seed for the Moi program was planted in 2018, when Metro acquired Jean Coutu, the largest pharmacy chain in Quebec. Back then, the company had three different loyalty programs – but no unified view of who its customers were or how they were shopping.

It was clear that its loyalty strategy needed to change. The company determined the best way to deliver value to its customers was to bring all of its banners under a single loyalty program. So, in 2023, Metro debuted the Moi program in Quebec, where the company has its strongest foothold. “It was a five-year journey, and a big transformation,” says Tadros.

“But with this approach, we have one view of a customer across all of our banners, and it allows us to dig into the data,” says Tadros. “For each loyalty customer, we track about 150 different attributes. The data is anonymized, and it includes everything from the products you buy to your lifestyle segment to your price sensitivity. Based on the attributes, we can provide a personalized experience.”

Tadros also notes that the Moi program supports Metro’s marketing ambitions and continued growth in these markets.

“There is no such thing as a loyal customer,” he says. “When people make purchasing decisions, loyalty is layered on top of proximity and price. Loyalty can’t replace those things, but it can be another lever – an additional tool in a retailer’s toolbox.”

To add value to Moi, it partnered with RBC’s Avion rewards program, where shoppers could earn additional points by linking their account to their Avion debit and credit cards. Uptake has been strong in the province. According to the 2024 Wow Leger Survey, Moi is the most widely used loyalty program in Quebec, and nearly 80% of customers engage with it.

But Metro is not as big as some of the other major grocery retailers in Ontario, and so the company had to consider how the program would transfer to Canada’s most populous province. Those considerations started with the program’s French language name.

“When we focus-grouped the name Moi, it actually scored better in English-speaking markets than in bilingual ones,” says Tadros. “There were no red lights in bilingual cities like Ottawa either, but English-speaking markets really liked the French twist. So, we said, let’s go with it.”

However, other aspects were not as directly transferable. In Quebec, the program was advertised with endorsements from celebrities in the province’s French-language cultural industries. Ontario does not have a province-level star system like Quebec does, so the concept wouldn’t work there. And endorsements from Ontario-bred celebrities with global reach weren’t in the cards. So, Metro did the next best thing: it enlisted real Ontarians with celebrity namesakes – like Ryan Reynolds from Barrie, Julia Roberts from Ottawa, and Jennifer Lopez from Toronto.

Meanwhile, the Quebec campaign toyed with the idea of a celebrity’s outsized ego. Some of the province’s top talent leaned into the stereotype, uttering lines about the greatness of ‘moi’ – which translates as ‘me.’ “It was a great success in Quebec, and when we launched Ontario, we wanted to come out very strong there too,” says Tadros.

For the Ontario launch, Toronto-based Open pitched the idea of everyday people with real celebrity names – with the birth certificates to prove it – a loyalty program so tailored to its users that it, in effect, treats everyone as though they’re a celebrity.

“Right away, we knew it was a great concept, but there was also a clear risk: would real people be able to deliver the outcome we expect?” says Tadros. “We took a leap of faith, and we are pleased with where this campaign is at right now.” The program, according to Metro, is tracking 3.9 million members who shop at its eight banners that span 1,175 stores across Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick.

“Moi is all about personalization,” adds Tadros. “It is about bringing loyalty to another level, delivering on what matters most to you, and making you feel special. It is about giving everyone the celebrity treatment.”