Strategic design. Instant impact. Lasting growth.
At this year’s RCCSTORE2026 conference, Jean-Pierre Lacroix and Debbie Lai, VP Marketing at Staples, explore how retailers can build brands that connect instantly and authentically with consumers. From powerful brand storytelling to design to community building and emerging tools like AI, this conversation covers the strategies retailers need to create deeper loyalty and lasting emotional connections with consumers.
Hi, I'm Debbie Lie. I am the VP of marketing at Staples Canada where I lead our brand, media, customer marketing teams for B2C as well as B2B.
My name is Jean-Pierre Lacroix, founder of SLD. And an interesting little tidbit, our company is 36 years old. The year we started the company, I got a call from a gentleman by the name of Jack Begelman. And he said, "Hey JP, you work with me on Beaver Lumber. We're going to start a new little venture. would you like to be on the journey with us? That was Business Depot, soon to be Staples, and what a great Canadian success story. So, we were doing research the same year for a major retailer in the US, and we're noticing that they weren't calling it by the brand name. They were looking at the color and shape. And so, we dig deeper into the psychology of color and shape. We found out that it's the direct connection to creating emotional connections. And we launched the term Blink Factor about 10 years before the book blink came out. We believe that the future of competitive advantage is creating deep emotional connections between the consumer and the brand because differentiation based on functional needs compared very quickly. What we found out was that brands that are emotionally connected have a 70% higher loyalty and 4.6 times more singularly focused on that one retailer. So I wrote a book last year on the Think Blink Manifesto. It represents seven tenants and what I'm going to do with with Debbie is walk you through each tenant and how staples have applied those principles to their business so that you can have context of you can apply those principles to your business. So tenant one we talked a lot about it is the heart wins every time. owning that one emotional piece of equity is critical.
That was easy was actually launched about 20 years ago. And so, and it's it's it's incredibly powerful. Um, we learned while we were building um how we were going to bring it back that there were 7.5 million Easy Buttons sold since then. And on top of that, the that was easy statement is is mentioned every 12 minutes.
The second tenant, one that's obviously dear to my heart is design as a strategic tool. How do you bring that experience, that emotional connection to life?
It's it's hard actually. It's it's um one of the things that uh we really wanted to do was ground it in a very human real human truth and that is people are overwhelmed today. So instead of focusing on products, we really lean into that tension. You know, when you're completely overwhelmed, you've got lots on your to-do list. And actually um that uh that um commercial was actually shot on the soccer field and I've been that mom where I've got this tons to do and I'm trying to enjoy the moment but I can't. So we brought that orb as really a physical manifestation of the to-do list and all the stress and then with the push of the Easy Button, that disappears and your to-do list is checked off. So the next tenant on our list is about storytelling. And many times we kind of overlook the most salient story our brand has because we're focused on the functional benefits. But consumers, they're looking for that story. And the younger generation now, they're looking for your purpose in the marketplace. And so clear articulation. So how did you bring the campaign to life?
So we really leaned into the concept of the checklist. Um because we have solutions. Whether you're a small business or you're a mom getting your kids back to school, we've got all these great solutions and and one of them that you'll see on on the page is like you can actually, you know, get a get a lot done if you were planning a wedding. Get your invites done. You can get your bridesmaid boxes and welcome signs, but you can also ship back those gifts that you don't want anymore. So, it's there's all that concept of the to-do list really allowed us to bring together different parts of our businesses together and come across as a cohesive brand but also a cohesive solution for our customers.
Next tenant really is tenant four is context is critical. Context is really looking at who are your customers or customer segments. Are they converted to personas? I'm always shocked that when we get hired to do a transformation program, the first question we ask is have you have clearly defined personas for your brand and very often they don't and how do you create you know this alignment if you don't know who your target group is.
So how did the personas shape your strategy? So when we were building this first launch of easy, it was very much around the family and within that family, you'll see a lot of the um iterations from photography and how it shows up and on our site is the mom's actually a small business owner as well,
right? So how do you bring it contextually but also try not to do too much in everything, right? So we need to bring the different scenarios to life in the right place at the right time.
So let's move on to the next tenant tenant five. And this was the foundation of my first book belonging experiences. You know I I believe that Maslow had it all wrong. I believe that belonging we're all social creatures is the most critical factor because without belonging we can't aspire. So so creating that sense of belonging for a brand creating a sense of community is critical. So how did you create that sense of belonging for Staples?
Yeah. So I think I I just was mentioning about um how important it is for our customers to see um this themselves in our brand. And one of the opportunities and partnerships that we had was really with Sick Kids and and that's um an image of our partnership with Sick Kids and and and we did this during back to school because back to school can be really exciting but also really stressful. And so we built this easy back to school bus that had was filled with supplies or technology and we were bringing it to communities. But one of the first stops the first stop that we made was at Sick Kids because if back to school is stressful for us as a your average family, it can be extra stressful and difficult for parents and families at Sick Kids. um because those milestones can be missed and it's and parents have to leave work sometimes as well and that addict expense as well as the emotional burden of being a parent um with a sick child.
So let's move on to the next measuring what matters. You know we we always look at what is the organization measuring because we know that what gets measured gets rewarded gets you know completed but when we do the assessment when we do transformational programs we do the assessment very few emotional factors are being measured. A lot of it is you know efficiency you know um value NPS scores uh but not about what is the emotional equities that we own are there gaps in those emotional equities and what we've also found that historically it's been very difficult to measure those but now with sentiment analysis AI and some some firms like hotspecs who research emotional equities it's become a lot easier for retailers to identify what are those emotional triggers. How do we measure them? Where are the gaps? So, talk to me. How did you measure the emotional impact?
We do a lot of our research with Fusion and it's it's also this brand association and we with with our launch of easy as well as our holiday campaign, we actually had very strong scores in the recognition and link of who did this. And recently, as I I mentioned, cattle also um did a survey for us which was super informative and in the year after the launch, we found that almost 50% of Canadians actually still recognized the campaign and more than a quarter of them remembered it really really well.
Let's talk to the last tenant. The last tenant is anticipating the future and we do a lot of scenario planning where we look at what are the implications. We are the our firm identified COVID before it actually happened 18 months before. So always looking at what are the disruptive trends but also what are the trends that we need to look at as retailers.
So how did you scale this program looking at the future? It's it's it's making sure that they see us as not just a destination retailer, which we absolutely are, but a retailer that they can pick up some great products at a great price as well as having the solutions at a right price. So, that's one of the things that we are leaning very much into. The other piece is we really launch easy very much from a consumer um lens. Um we are this year going to be leaning into bringing easy for businesses um and being known for business um many of us do as well as services. So, how do we bring that more from an enterprise lens and and bringing that to the forefront um much more boldly?