Canadian Marketers Still Need US Audiences: What Marketing South of the Border Looks Like Right Now
Every conversation about Canadian marketing this year starts in the same place. Buy Canadian. Anti-tariff billboards on American highways. Loblaw's CEO telling shareholders that sales on tariff-marked items dropped by double digits wherever a homegrown alternative existed. It's a real story and it's the one everyone's telling.
Here's the one nobody's telling. On August 19, a new 50 percent US tariff on a range of Canadian goods takes effect. And the vast majority of Canadian businesses selling into the US, whether that's a fashion brand, a software company, or a tourism board, still need that market. Not because they're unpatriotic. Because Canada is roughly 41 million people and the US is roughly 342 million. The market next door is about eight times the size of the one at home, and no amount of national pride changes that math.
So while half the industry is figuring out how to sell Canadian pride to Canadians, a quieter question is sitting underneath it: how do you keep selling to Americans when the political mood has turned, the tariffs keep climbing, and “Canadian" has become a loaded word on both sides of the border?
The Discount Diplomacy
New York City just spent real money finding this out the hard way. On July 28, NYC Tourism + Conventions launched the Northern Neighbour Deal: 30 percent off more than 85 hotels, plus discounts on Broadway, museums, and attractions, running August 18 through September 7. Porter Airlines tacked on 20 percent off flights. The math behind it is straightforward. Canada is New York's second-largest international market, and visitor numbers are still sitting around 800,000 a year, down from nearly a million before 2019. The city wants those numbers back, and it built a discount big enough to offset the exchange rate entirely.
Las Vegas got there first and went further. Casino owner Derek Stevens rolled out an “At Par Program" at three of his resorts, letting Canadians pay in Canadian dollars at par with the US dollar on rooms, drinks, and gaming. It worked, at least by the numbers he shared: 15,000 Canadian visitors and 2,700 booked room nights in the first month.
Canadians online weren't exactly grateful, and that reaction is worth sitting with. The Globe and Mail put its finger on why: there's something a little off about a place that spent months being too eager to have you back, especially when the going-away wasn't about price in the first place. A 30 percent discount doesn't touch the reasons people actually stopped booking: annexation talk, tariffs, stories about travelers getting stopped at the border. Money was never really the obstacle. It's the same lesson Canadian brands have been learning all year running the reverse play: nobody's boycotting American goods because Canadian alternatives are cheaper, and nobody's going to come back to Florida because a hotel got 30 percent off.
Both countries are currently trying to buy back trust with a discount code. Neither side's math is wrong. Discounts move bookings, at least in the short term. But if identity and politics are what pulled the audience away in the first place, a percentage off is a tactic standing in for a strategy.
What Actually Works Instead
If discounts aren't the fix, what is? The brands and businesses actually holding steady in the US right now aren't the ones cutting prices to compensate for the politics. They're the ones treating the relationship as something to keep earning, not something a currency conversion can patch over.
Take a fashion brand like Duer as a decent example of what that looks like in practice.Nearly half its revenue comes from US customers, and rather than pulling back when tariffs hit, the brand is opening more US stores and building out its own fulfillment south of the border instead of leaning on a third party. That's not a messaging decision. It's a bet that staying physically present and operationally reliable matters more right now than anything you'd put in an ad.
For software and services, the starting line looks completely different, and it's worth naming why: tariffs are a goods problem. A Canadian SaaS company or agency selling into the US isn't absorbing new duties or untangling customs codes.Cross-border M&A in mid-market SaaS actually picked back up through 2025 once buyers realized services were largely outside the blast radius. Which means the obstacle for a services business isn't cost. It's the same trust gap everyone else is dealing with, minus the tariff math to hide behind. A prospective client isn't going to Google whether your invoice includes a duty line. They're deciding whether they still want to do business with a Canadian company at all, and that's a conversation, not a spreadsheet.
Then there's the other end of this entirely: tourism and hospitality. New York and Vegas are spending millions trying to pull Canadians back south. No one's mounted an equivalent campaign to pull Americans north, and it's worth asking why. Maybe Canadian tourism doesn't need American visitors the way Florida needs Canadian ones. Or maybe it's a gap nobody's noticed yet, sitting right next to a headline about billboards in Atlanta.
Different businesses, same underlying test: are you showing up like you plan to still be there next year, or like you're managing a bad quarter.
Two Bets, Same Week
One way to answer the tariff question is to lean all the way into being Canadian. That's the bet behind “There's No Can't in Canada," the new Ford campaign from W+K Toronto, timed to the return of Ford's Employee Pricing program and built entirely around the automaker's roots here, right as cross-border relations have gone cold. Every dollar behind it assumes Canadian identity is the thing worth buying into, and for a brand selling mostly to Canadians, that's the right room to be playing to.
The opposite bet showed up the same week, under the same tariff pressure. Duer made it without a single ad. More US stores. More of its own fulfillment built out instead of leaning on a third party. No flag, no pride messaging. Just presence, in a market it can't afford to lose.
Both bets are correct, and that's the part worth sitting with. The tariffs are identical. The playbooks aren't. What decides which one applies has nothing to do with patriotism or politics. It comes down to something simpler: where the customers are actually standing.
The Cost of Going Quiet
The instinct when a market turns hostile is to pull back. Cut the ad spend, wait it out, revisit when things calm down. Loblaw's own numbers show why that instinct is wrong even at home: brands that disappeared from shelves didn't get remembered fondly, they got replaced. The same logic runs the other direction. A Canadian business that goes quiet in the US for the next year isn't preserving anything. It's handing the relationship to whoever stays loud.
Nobody knows how long this lasts. The tariff on August 19 might be the peak of it, or it might not be. What's harder to undo is what happens to a customer relationship that went dark for a year and expects to just pick back up once the politics move on. The businesses that keep showing up now, awkward market or not, are the ones that'll still have an audience on the other side of it.
