The Increasing Importance of Personalization
More importantly, Maxi’s Customer Value Proposition aligns well with the shifting Quebec market, driving its recent momentum. The region is increasingly focused on savings, with Price and Mass Promotions accounting for more than 50% of retailer performance—placing Maxi in a strong position versus Costco, despite trailing in Quality. Both brands remain well-positioned for Quebec and, alongside other Club/Superstore and Discounters, are poised for future growth.
Maxi’s success, and that of similar retailers, reflects a growing national trend: the combination of Price, Mass Promo levers and Personalized Promo, Rewards as a “one-two punch” strategy for attracting and retaining customers. These pillars, following Quebec’s lead, are gaining importance across Canada, now influencing nearly 50% of overall outcomes nationally. Retailers that excel in this strategy are shaping the Canadian market more than ever.
Maxi, No Frills among the strongest one-two punch, in a group of lead conductors of the price, promo, rewards mix. These retailers aren’t only strong in base price, but they also effectively deploy the mix of private brand pricing, promotions available for everyone, promotions available only for members of loyalty programs, and personalized offers that reward those same members – all effectively supported with marketing and communications emphasizing these savings opportunities.
These lead conductors have stronger long-term growth, market share, and share of wallet.
These charts also underscore the difficulty conventionals have in the current competitive landscape - not only are leader conductors beating them on Price, Mass Promo levers, they are also at parity or ahead of most conventionals on Personalized Promo, Rewards. However, there is a clear path to optimizing growth for conventionals, and that is discussed in a later section, using Zehrs, which ranks at the top of the 2nd Tercile overall, as a case study.
First, we’ll close out our discussion of trends by reviewing the short list of top rank gainers in Canada, overall and for different pillars.
Zehrs Markets, No Frills, and Maxi are the overall gainers in the Canada RPI 2025, with the latter now occupying the 2nd spot overall. On the two most important pillars, Dominion jumped six spots on product Quality, which pushed it from the 2nd Tercile overall to the back of the 1st, this year.
Metro, driven by their loyalty program improvements this year in Ontario, rose 6 spots overall in Personalized Promo and Rewards. Longo’s, however, had improvements of their own on this pillar, rising 8 spots overall. Fortinos rose 6 spots on this trending pillar, and FreshCo, while not a top 3 gainer, rose a notable 5 spots.
Price and Mass Promo positioning was more stable, with no retailers improving more than 2 spots.
On the remaining pillars, Whole Foods is trending upward in both Speed, Convenience and Operations, while Zehrs, Provigo, and Food Basics are the highlights on Digital.
