The revealing word in Source for Sports’ current slogan is not “game.” It is “your.” A national retailer can speak about products, selection and expertise. “We Fit Your Game” turns all three toward the person standing at the counter: the child buying a first glove, the goalie replacing a worn pad, the runner whose left foot refuses to behave like the right. The line carries Donna Finelli’s central marketing problem in four words. How can one brand show up consistently across Canada while each independently owned store remains useful in its own particular way?
Finelli has spent much of her career inside brands that sit close to Canadian routine. She led brand marketing at Tim Hortons from 2003 to 2011, then served as vice president of marketing for food and merchandise through 2013. A 2013 product launch put her beside an Apple Cobbler Donut inspired by a Food Network Canada competition. The detail is almost comic in its specificity, but it captures the work: popular culture, menu design, a familiar counter and a small purchase made nationwide.
Her résumé also includes Cossette, McDonald’s Canada, Mattel and SC Johnson. These are different businesses, but each asks a marketer to understand ordinary decisions at scale. A toy comes off a shelf. A household product enters a routine. A restaurant visit has to feel predictable without becoming lifeless. Finelli’s career developed where brand strategy meets the unglamorous mechanics of delivery.
The machinery behind the message
At Boston Pizza International, the mechanics became part of her formal remit. Finelli joined in October 2015 as vice president of marketing insights and services. Her portfolio included digital infrastructure, menu production and design, customer relationship management, research and analytics. In November 2017, she became interim senior vice president of marketing, responsible for marketing across the Boston Pizza system.
That progression matters because it complicates the glossy version of a chief marketer’s job. Advertising was only one layer. The menu had to be produced. Customer information had to travel. Research had to become a decision. Digital infrastructure had to hold. For a system made of many restaurants, the promise at the center is only as credible as the operations at the edge.
When Finelli joined Source for Sports in May 2019, she inherited another distributed system. Sports Distributors of Canada operates the brand as a national buying group. Its stores are independently owned by members of their communities. The arrangement creates buying power and national recognition without turning every location into the same box. It also creates a delicate marketing task. A national campaign has to be coherent, but a store’s credibility comes from local knowledge that cannot be scripted from Burlington.
The network’s structure gives that problem a physical form. The national site can put hockey equipment, baseball gloves, footwear and team apparel under one digital roof. The local page has to answer a more practical question: what can this store do for me? Depending on the location, the answer may include skate profiling, glove repair, ski waxing, bike service, embroidery or team fittings. Product selection and services vary by store because the communities vary. The shared brand creates a recognizable entrance; the individual owner determines much of what waits inside.
Turning expertise around
The old positioning, “We Know Our Stuff,” made a claim about the retailer. Research with young athletes and parents found that it could feel dated and even intimidating to recreational players. The expertise itself was valuable. The posture needed work. The new position kept the knowledge and changed its direction: no two players are the same, so the job is to find what fits a person’s body, style, level, goals and budget.
“We Fit Your Game” is less a victory lap than a job description. It places the employee and customer in the same sentence, even when neither is named. It also gives local variation a reason to exist. A community store can choose categories, products and services around the sports people actually play nearby. One location might sharpen skates and repair hockey gear. Another might tune bikes, wax skis or outfit teams. The variation is not leakage from the brand system. It is evidence for the promise.
When expertise risks sounding exclusive, express it as a service. Move the sentence from what the company knows to what the customer can do with that knowledge.
Finelli credited the rebrand’s development process with involving internal stakeholders and carrying the customer’s voice through every phase. That phrasing reveals an operator’s concern. A new identity had to win over shoppers, but it also had to work for the store owners who would install it, fund it and live with it. In April 2023, she posted a terse update as the designs appeared around the country: “Re-branding and design coming to life across the country.” The photos did the rest. Strategy had reached the walls.
The town is the media plan
By 2026, the positioning had become a pair of 30-second films, “Hometowns Like These” and “Source for Community.” The campaign ran through Sportsnet+, digital channels and connected television. Its subject was not an elite athlete or a technological marvel. It was the role a sporting-goods store plays in town.
Finelli called the owners and their staff “ambassadors for sport in their towns.” She pointed to the jobs around the transaction: making sure teams look right in their jerseys, fitting the proper gear, sponsoring clubs, coaching and cheering. The language broadens retail without pretending retail is something else. The store still sells the stick. It also remembers the team.
There is restraint in choosing those scenes. Many campaigns borrow the emotional force of community from a distance. This one points at work already performed by owners and staff. The marketing value follows the behavior rather than preceding it. For a member-owned network, that sequence is especially useful: headquarters can amplify a story it did not need to invent.
It also closes a loop in Finelli’s career. Tim Hortons and Boston Pizza taught the language of mass familiarity, repeated occasions and distributed operations. Source for Sports offers a different balance. The national organization supports the conditions for scale, while local ownership supplies texture. Her job is not to erase the seam. It is to make the seam intelligible.
A career measured in handoffs
A marketer in a distributed business works through handoffs. Research passes to strategy. Strategy passes to design. Design passes to store owners. The campaign passes to media. The promise finally passes to a staff member fitting a skate or answering a parent’s question. Each transition can flatten the idea. Finelli’s documented roles show an unusual amount of time spent near those transitions: analytics, customer relationship systems, menu production, brand positioning and physical rollout.
There is another handoff inside the word “fit.” It moves between the measurable and the personal. A skate can be heated, stretched or profiled. A glove can be repaired. A uniform can be sized and printed. Yet the same word also makes room for level of play, taste, goals and budget. This lets the campaign speak in emotional language while remaining attached to services a store can perform. For a retailer, that attachment is useful discipline. The line does not float above the transaction; it gives employees a way to describe why the transaction deserves care.
The promise also gives e-commerce a defined role. Source for Sports offers national online shopping and store pickup, but its own language keeps returning to one-on-one advice and local availability. Digital convenience and store expertise sit beside each other. Finelli’s earlier responsibility for digital infrastructure and customer relationship management makes this less of a philosophical choice than an operating one: the customer should be able to move between a national screen and a nearby owner without feeling that the brand has changed subjects.
Her public comments are similarly grounded in partners and teams. At her Source for Sports appointment, she spoke about partnering with store owners. During the rebrand, she emphasized stakeholders and customers. In the hometown campaign, she directed attention toward owners and staff. The repeated choice is worth noticing. The brand is described through the people who have to deliver it.
That makes the local advantage more than a sentimental claim. It is an operating model. National scale negotiates, distributes and broadcasts. Local knowledge selects, adjusts and reassures. Source for Sports needs both, and its marketing has to prevent either side from swallowing the other.
Finelli’s career has moved through familiar corners of Canadian commerce, but her current work is about specificity: this player, this town, this fit. The sharper the national platform becomes, the more clearly it can point toward the person at the counter. That is the quiet trick inside “your.”