DOUBLE DOUBLE INDEMNITY
AS OF 2015, AFTER THE NETHERLANDS AND FINLAND, CANADIANS ARE THE WORLD’S THIRD BIGGEST COFFEE DRINKERS, WITH THE AVERAGE CANADIAN CONSUMING 152 LITRES OF COFFEE PER YEAR, ACCORDING TO EUROMONITOR. How did a coffee chain of middling quality come to be syno
In the mid-1990s Tim Hortons faced a crisis of identity. They needed, they felt, to understand their extraordinary success. Who was drinking their coffee? How did people perceive their brand – what impressions and associations did it conjure? The donut empire was already, by 1996, ubiquitous. But that ubiquity posed a question: why did Canadians love Tim Hortons?
Ron Buist, the company’s long- time director of marketing, sought to find out. He hired Trevor Collier Research to orchestrate a comprehensive nationwide survey of intensive interviews and focus groups. In cities across Canada, men and women from every demographic who described themselves as habitual coffee-drinkers convened around a table with a moderator in a room with a two- way mirror. They shared their opinion of the product: they spoke favourably about the taste and freshness of the coffee, the low prices, the consistency day- to- day. But mostly they shared stories. Tim Hortons customers, Buist discovered, had Tim Hortons rituals – little daily rites they cherished as much as the coffee itself.
Buist’s researchers i nterviewed a woman who had insisted on stopping at a Tim Hortons drive-through while in labour on the way to the hospital. They heard from a man who’d stipulated in his will that his funeral procession pass a Tim Hortons and enjoy a round of gratis coffees. And they talked to Lilian – an elderly woman from tiny Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, who each morning made the arduous pilgrimage by foot and cane uphill from her home to the nearest Tim Hortons for her beloved Double Double. This last anecdote enthralled Buist’s shrewd mind. In its simplicity he saw a quaint charm that was widely appealing: the old lady and her winsome routine, a testament to her affection for Tim Hortons coffee. Buist could work with that.
Lilian was the basis of an advertising campaign that swiftly seized the popular imagination of Canadians. You might even remember Lilian: marching up the road in scarf and hat to brace against the cold, amber sun beginning to rise behind her, the smile of cheerful tenacity on her wrinkled face. She was the star of a television commercial that aired throughout the country in 1997 – one that brought tears to innumerable eyes and helped confirm the brand’s reputation as our de facto national religion. “I’ve seen her before,” a befuddled fisherman concedes on the waterfront in an authentic east-coast brogue. “I don’t know why she doesn’t make her own coffee.” A happy Tim Hortons employee laughs warmly in recognition: “She always orders the same thing,” she says. “I’d say Lilian’s one of the family.” A gentle piano melody plays her homeward into the dawn, as a new slogan reminds us: “Tim Hortons. The coffee you can count on.”
This campaign, dubbed “True Stories,” ran for years in different permutations, each a variation on a single theme – one about a hockey coach who rewarded his players with coffee after practice, one about an ambitious snow- plow driver who cleared the roads so drivers could still get their morning brew. These commercials embodied the philosophy of Tim Hortons. They articulated something unspoken about the symbolic power of the brand: that patrons of the coffee shop partake in something more exalted than merely exchanging cash for caffeine – that they share in something ceremonial, traditional. Tim Hortons spent decades cultivating its image as an indispensable thread in the fabric of our lives.
Its triumph was not that it sold coffee, but that it sold us an indelible idea. Somehow, improbably, a mediocre coffee chain became a cornerstone of our national identity. Worse, we have never seemed to mind.
Tim Hortons began, of course, with Tim Horton, erstwhile defenceman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, star player during a period of unparalleled success for the team. His backup career as an entrepreneur started at a barbershop in the Colony Plaza at the corner of Lawrence and Warden in Scarborough. It was while having his hair trimmed one afternoon in the early 1960s that he was introduced to Dennis Griggs and Jim Charade, owners of the upstart Your Do- Nut Shop next door. Horton was interested in developing a business to which he could transition once his time with the NHL waned. Charade and Griggs, meanwhile, were eager for a gimmick with which to promote their new café, and so invited him to join the company and lend their enterprise his valuable name. He enthusiastically agreed, and in a flash of happenstance and inauspicious inspiration, the Canadian corporate colossus was born.
One after another in close succession, Charade and Griggs opened several Tim Horton Restaurants: humble fast-food eateries that sold chicken and hamburgers, based mainly in downtown Toronto. These restaurants were not successful. There were too many competitors in the market, too little about their concept to differentiate the brand. But as these outlets failed, the original Your Do-Nut Shop thrived. Canadians, it seemed, wanted coffee and donuts, and had few places to get them. So they refined their premise, bought a disused gas station on Ottawa Street North in Hamilton, and after renovating the building, opened the inaugural Tim Horton Donut Shop in 1964. It was, at last, a hit.
Ron Joyce was a police officer in Hamilton with aspirations for a fortune as a businessman. Not long before these events he had invested his savings in a Dairy Queen franchise – one so hugely lucrative he wanted at once to expand. Dairy Queen rejected his application to open another franchise, claiming he lacked the requisite financial backing. Flush with cash and anxious to make more, Joyce happened upon the Tim Horton Donut Shop.
He sensed an opportunity for expansion. Moreover, he sensed the current owners were weak: the unsuccessful Tim Hortons Restaurants were eating resources, driving the company further into debt, while the breadth of their domain obliged the owners to commute back and forth between Hamilton and Toronto to the point of exhaustion. When Joyce offered Charade a lump sum of $10,000 to buy his share of the business, he consented without hesitation. Thus the unassuming Tim Horton Donut Shop was rechristened Tim Horton’s – apostrophe intact for the time being – and, under the leadership of company president Ron Joyce, the newly incorporated Tim Donut LTD initiated its phenomenal ascent to coffeeand-donut glory.
The chain grew rapidly: it was Joyce’s conviction that the fastest and safest way to proliferate was to franchise the brand and sell each new outlet to an independent investor, and by the end of the decade there were dozens of Timmy satellites around the province. They spread to the west coast, and then to the east. ( Moncton, New Brunswick remains the city with the highest concentration of Tim Hortons in the country, with about one store for every two thousand residents.) And naturally it wasn’t long before they were endeavouring to penetrate the United States: the first American Tim Hortons opened in 1981. Since then, the company has had mixed results stateside, where customers haven’t always understood the point of the brand.
What was the point? Tim Hortons, though it seems selfexplanatory now, is a somewhat eccentric idea for a chain. It sells donuts, but doesn’t seem like a donut shop. It sells tea and coffee, but doesn’t seem like a café. It isn’t a coffee shop, in the sense of Starbucks or Second Cup: there isn’t enough attention paid to the quality or variety of coffee. Nor is it a restaurant, exactly – they serve food, but more snacks than meals, and it’s significant that the average transaction is only $ 2.50, the average time a customer spends in the store per sale is mere minutes. Tim Hortons has in the past described itself uniquely as a “break- time store,” which fits with its popular “You’ve Always Got Time For Tim Hortons” campaign slogan.
It’s Tim Hortons: in some indefinable way, it simply is. The reputation they developed as the quintessential Canadian hangout was a case of mere necessity. The company didn’t have the means to hire an advertising agency or develop elaborate marketing campaigns. What it had was a likeable, inexpensive product and a domestic origin story. So it did all it could to promote that. Joyce had the idea for a plastic coffee mug bearing the Tim Hortons name that would be effectively free with the purchase of any coffee: the mug had a base that fixed it to the dashboard of a car, which meant every customer on the road could be a driving billboard for their brand. In fact, Joyce believed the coffee cup was the best form of advertising available. That was why, in 1985, he and Ron Buist devised a way to incentivize customers to switch from medium coffees to large, to double the advertising real estate. It was a contest to win free donuts whose participating cups were only available in the largest sizes. They called it Roll Up the Rim To Win. It did exactly what it was designed to.
This “invisible” approach to advertising had the unexpected effect of giving customers the impression that Tim Hortons was a family company, modest and warm – an impression Joyce courted and, when the company could finally afford to advertise on TV, promoted aggressively. All through the 1990s Tim Hortons commercials emphasized the affection its customers had for the brand, playing up our universal loyalty and all but declaring that patronizing their stores was an act of actual patriotism. The efficacy of this campaigning can be measured not only by the commercial success of Tim Hortons Inc. but by column inches in the national press: more has been written, both effusive and critical, about the company, its coffee, and its cultural impact in Canada than virtually any other domestic brand. It sometimes seems the only thing Canadians love more than drinking Tim Hortons coffee is reading about what it means.
This month the company has come under fire for the response of some franchisees to the mandatory minimum wage increase in Ontario, which i ncluded stripping benefits, banning tips and removing paid breaks. Tim Hortons is owned by a parent company that grossed more than $ 4- billion in fiscal 2016 – thanks to the tireless labour, needless to say, of the many thousands of employees the company’s franchisees have been reluctant to pay a living wage. The irony is all the richer given the brand’s strong associations with the working class. This is, in contrast to Starbucks and other metropolitan coffee chains, a resolutely, even proudly blue-collar company.
The darker truths of how Tim Hortons operated – anything that clashed with the affable, family-friendly image they maintained as a veneer – were scrupulously concealed. The company line described the operation as “like one big family,” a refrain you’ll read in every history and biography related to the founding of the brand. In actuality, Joyce was a tyrant. Buist, an unfaltering ally, relates in his memoirs stories of Joyce visiting franchise locations for “random inspections” that ended, if he was even slightly unsatisfied, with him hurling donuts at the walls of the store, screaming at employees in fits of rage.
Company literature tends to gloss over facts that don’t fit the narrative – like how Tim Horton, himself, died while driving drunk at a hundred miles an hour. The narrative does not survive scrutiny. Do such narratives ever? It’s well- known that Tim Hortons merged with Wendy’s International to become an American company in the mid-1990s, around the times its nationalist messaging was at its loudest; it was repatriated in 2009, but in its current status as multi- billion-dollar multinational megacorporation, it relinquishes any claims it may have had in the ’60s to some idea of “local.”
Lilian never existed, incidentally. Or rather, an old lady did tell one of Buist’s market researchers that she walked to get her coffee every morning, but her story was one of dozens, hundreds, just like it. So for the commercial, Buist and company made an old lady up. Lilian was a professional actress; so too was the fisherman, as were the employees of the Lunenburg Tim Hortons who claimed she was “one of the family.” That whole maudlin, tear-jerking True Story contained only a whisper of the truth, a fact it shares in common with every other True Story in the original campaign.
Many people really do love Tim Hortons and cherish their daily routine, but this testament to affection was an illusion dreamed up to sell an idea. In the mid- 90s Tim Hortons wanted to understand why their brand was so widely beloved in this country. Given what we know, 20 years later, the question must be posed again: why
do Canadians love Tim Hortons?
PEOPLE LOVE TIM HORTONS, BUT THE AFFECTION IS AN ILLUSION.