Will Novosedlik’s article was previously featured in the Summer 2026 issue of Strategy Magazine.

Over the years, national brand studies of how Canada is perceived by the rest of the world have tended to land on oversimplified tropes like hockey, maple syrup and how damn friendly we are. In fact, we seem to have cornered the market on being “nice.” We’re the people everybody wants to be friends with.

But that idea doesn’t hold up particularly well under scrutiny. As author, marketer and researcher Max Valiquette puts it, “I’ve always pushed back against that idea that Canadians are nice.

“I know that we are generally quite polite, but it’s funny, we’re identified as two things in the world: nice and hockey. Watch Canadians play hockey and tell me again that you think we’re nice. Better yet, watch Canadian parents coach hockey or even cheer hockey from the sidelines. And again, tell me that we’re nice.”

Something has shifted in the last decade. Canadians have become culturally specific in ways that brands are finally noticing. The country now has one of the highest per capita immigration rates in the world, reshaping how people cook, celebrate, code-switch, parent and consume. That evolution is compounded by a far more fragmented media landscape, city-driven identities and a growing distrust of large institutions, all of which make broad, generalized messaging feel less relevant.

A brand that speaks to “Canada” with a single, unified cultural voice is now speaking to no one in particular.

The smarter brands are finding ways to embrace that multiplicity without flattening it. As Ron Tite, chief strategy and innovation officer at Toronto-based agency Church + State, puts it, “We’ve gone from maple syrup to micro voices. The Canadian brand has gone from ultra-general to pretty damn specific. We used to capture Canada with broad strokes and overused tropes. Now we’re tapping into actual people.”

You can hear that shift as much as you can see it. How Canadians actually talk – the mixture of English and French in Montreal, the Punjabi inflections in Brampton, and the specific cadence of Newfoundland speech – has all become richer and more particular than most marketing has historically bothered to reflect. When it does show up authentically, audiences notice immediately.

Rona’s ‘DIYctionary’ campaign embraced Quebec’s distinctive ‘Frenglish’ renovation vocabulary, showing how cultural specificity can be built directly into the customer experience.

Look at the specificity of Sid Lee’s 2025 “DIYctionary” campaign for Rona. Aimed at Québécois home renovators, the campaign was designed to improve the shopping experience by incorporating Quebec’s distinctive construction slang, a unique combination of English and French called “Frenglish,” turning frustrating search moments into meaningful brand connections. Rather than simply claiming to understand Quebecers, the brand built that understanding into the experience itself.

For example, in formal French, a grinder is a “rectifieuse.” In Quebec vernacular, it’s a “grindeur.” Rona added 225 of these Frenglish terms to its website so Quebecers could shop in their own language. As the brand says: “Chez Rona, on parle la langue de la réno.” (“At Rona, we speak the language of renovation.”) As Tite says, this is a brand that is “grounded in reality, not generality.”

This kind of work is starting to shape how Canadians see themselves reflected back. According to Susan Seto, SVP market strategy at research firm Environics, the sense of national pride revealed in its Canadian Brands: Built on Values 2026 report comes from seeing brands that reflect the diversity, understated confidence, inclusivity and compassion associated with Canadian identity. She cites brands like Farm Boy, Kicking Horse Coffee and Indigenous-led Cheekbone Beauty – all very local, grassroots and indicative of the growing trust Canadians place in homegrown brands as confidence in large corporations and institutions declines.

That’s not to say national brands haven’t attempted to adapt to these changes in Canadian culture. PC has probably done this longer and more consistently than most other Canadian brands. The “Memories of” campaign – which brought immigrant food memories into mainstream grocery culture – was an early and sophisticated example of using food as a proxy for lived Canadian experience rather than a performance of multiculturalism.

Food is where Canadian cultural specificity is most legible and least contested, and PC understood that before most. PC’s product development (the actual SKUs, not just the ads) has tracked demographic change in a way that is itself a form of cultural responsiveness – adding products that reflect what people in Brampton, Richmond or Scarborough actually cook, not just what a national ad planner imagined they might.

By focusing on the social habits surrounding e-Transfers, Interac has turned a financial utility into a distinctly Canadian cultural touchpoint.

Interac is another underrated example. Its recent creative work has moved away from generic financial reassurance toward something that tries to capture how Canadians actually handle money relationally – splitting bills, e-transferring rent between friends, navigating the financial texture of shared urban life. E-transfer has become so embedded in Canadian social behaviour – arguably a cultural artifact at this point – that the brand has something real to work with. The creative has tried, with reasonable success, to reflect the specific social rituals around money in a country where those rituals cross cultural lines but feel distinctly local.

Even legacy identity brands are being forced to evolve. Roots occupies an interesting middle space. It has always sold a version of Canadian identity – the cabin, the beaver, the athletic heritage – but its more recent work has done something smarter: opening that identity up to who is actually inside it.

Campaigns that centre Black Canadians, Indigenous Canadians and immigrant families within the visual language of what was historically a very particular (white, cottage-country) brand aesthetic represents a meaningful creative evolution.

Perhaps some of the most interesting examples of cultural specificity are those emerging in places like Toronto and Vancouver through the ecosystem of South Asian media, retail and food brands that are often invisible to mainstream marketing conversations because they don’t travel through mainstream channels.

Brands like Sunrise Poultry, retailers in Scarborough or in Surrey’s Payal Business Centre, and media properties like Red FM or OMNI television’s Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition are doing highly granular, community-embedded marketing that reflects exactly the fragmented, lived identity Seto is talking about.

Most of what passes for culturally specific marketing is still brands responding to demographic data rather than genuinely reflecting lived experience. The difference shows up in the work: one feels observed, the other feels inhabited.

And when brands fail to keep up with that reality, the gap becomes obvious. What happens when a brand owns a cultural symbol but loses contact with the lived culture underneath it? Tim Hortons built one of the most powerful national identity brands in Canadian history – and then spent years hollowing it out through standardization, private equity ownership and campaigns that often missed the mark.

The tension in the Tims story is that symbolic Canadian identity (the double-double, the hockey rink, the small town) is not the same thing as cultural resonance. When the lived experience of the brand (the actual coffee, the actual stores) diverged from the mythology, brand equity eroded faster than the ads could patch it. Its more recent work has tried to return to specificity, leaning into particular communities and occasions.

These are some of the more honest and instructive examples: brands that have moved, with varying degrees of success, from symbolic Canadiana toward something more grounded in how people actually live. But most of what passes for culturally specific marketing is still brands responding to demographic data rather than genuinely reflecting lived experience. The difference shows up in the work: one feels observed, the other feels inhabited.

To give Tite the final word, “I think we’re over the performative era of ‘sounding nice.’ Canadians expect tangible action. Take RBC’s billion-dollar commitment to invest in Canadian businesses. Now that’s what I call an ad. It’s not just Canadian ideas that are driving marketing. It’s Canadian action.”