High-end outwear brand Canada Goose recently posted a short video to its social channels that clips together stunning shots of nature and people moving through unique and dangerous places: a tornado, an erupting volcano, a kayaker in rough waters and someone paragliding off a mountain.
The video is part of the brand’s new marketing platform “Natural Intelligence,” which reflects a desire to get back to a narrative more grounded in the outside world. Accordingly, “Natural Intelligence” launched earlier this month during the high season of nature’s calendar, right after the summer solstice, said Victoria Freeman, Canada Goose’s senior vice president of global marketing.
“We wanted to bring back the story and the connection to the actual world,” said Freeman. “Really what our whole brand is built around is facilitating exploration and helping people thrive in that natural world.”
The new brand platform is backed by a sentiment that consumers are feeling increasingly disconnected from nature.
The brand cited a September 2025 report from British Columbia, Canada’s tourism board that found 46% of people feel there is a nature deficit in the media and culture they consume. The report, which surveyed 2,000 adults in the U.S., noted that despite craving breaks from their screens, Gen Zers spend less time in nature than Gen Xers did when they were at that same age.
“Breaking away to the freedom of nature is something that we want to be an advocate of,” said Freeman.
Canada Goose’s previous longtime marketing platform, “Live in the Open,” centered around a sense of freedom and connecting with the outside world, said Freeman. The new messaging takes this a step further and leans heavily into trying to offer a deeper glimpse at the meaning behind the concept of natural intelligence.
“Natural intelligence is being unavailable but fully present,” a caption reads over a clip of a person boarding down a volcano. “Natural intelligence is the original operating system,” the overlay continues in a quick skip. The copy goes on in a similar vein: “Natural intelligence is feeling the season before the calendar agrees. Natural intelligence is reading clouds like subtitles. Natural intelligence is knowing the best stories don’t expire. Natural intelligence is being attached to nothing and connected to everything.”
Bringing the luxury of the outdoors to consumers
Reconnecting with nature isn’t a new concept nor a unique one in marketing. But the natural world is a luxury that not everyone has access to and the digital world has the tendency to pull people away from it, Freeman said.
“[The platform is] meant to be capturing the fringes and the phenomenon of the natural world and bringing some of those new storylines to the consumer and to our audience,” the exec said.
Canada Goose started rolling out its digital storytelling on its social media channels this month, with the platform running through the end of the year and likely beyond into 2027, per the company. Much of the summer push features diverse terrains around the world, while fall and winter iterations will feature people moving around in more winter-oriented elements.
The stories will be posted on Instagram and TikTok, featuring global events and locations where nature serves “as a source of knowledge,” Freeman said. Consumers will also get a glimpse into the lives and work of different field experts who interact with parts of the outside world that are often inaccessible or overlooked. Featured experts include a mushroom biologist, a stormchaser and a firefly researcher providing a behind-the-scenes view of the science and rhythms of the natural world.
“If you really listen to the atmosphere, it will tell you exactly when change is coming,” says storm chaser Paige Vincent over stunning shots of her taking photographs of tornados in a recent Instagram post by the company.
“[These are] niche territories of natural phenomenon that we don't even think about, and we're sort of surfacing these,” said Freeman.
Producing more expeditions and activations
The origins of the new platform can be traced back a couple of years. For the 2024 launch of its Snow Goose collection – designed by the company’s first creative director Haider Ackermann – the brand showcased the French designer’s trek through remote, snowy and mountainous landscapes of Iceland with a small group of people.
“That content for us just blew up on our digital channels,” said Freeman.
Wanting to continue sharing such experiences, but on a more accessible regional level, the company started taking smaller groups of people to interesting places, so it could tell more stories on its digital channels, said Freeman.
Once such excursion was a trip to Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the northern coast of British Columbia, Canada, that is influenced by the “power and aggression of the Pacific Ocean,” said Freeman. Content related to the trip started rolling out on July 24.
The brand also did an activation in June to celebrate Acqua di San Giovanni, a summer-solstice ritual in Tuscany, Italy, where people leave wild flowers immersed in water outside overnight, creating a cleansing, healing and replenishing mixture.
“That's a whole Italian ritual that happens that nobody talks about,” said Freeman. “But it has such amazing intelligence that's built into it.”
The brand is also cataloging a long list of creators who are considered field experts on digital spaces, including Instagram and TikTok, so it can post nods and recognition to their slice of natural intelligence in their comments, said Freeman. The idea is to conduct a more grassroots, guerrilla-type of marketing execution.
Merging lifestyle with the outside world
Before launching the new platform, the brand’s spring campaign centered on celebrating the return of the sun — an important event in Northern communities that go months without sunlight. Canada Goose sent a group clad in the brand’s apparel to Svalbard, Norway, to partake in its annual festival welcoming the sun back after more than 100 days of darkness.
That effort was the brand’s top-performing content to date in 2026 based on organic reach and engagement, the company stated in an email.
“It was a campaign that was very grassroots and experiential in activation and in nature,” said Freeman. “But it also had a fashion campaign component that brought in those visual elements of that return of the sun.”
The success of the campaign led the brand to realize they had something in the texture of the natural calendar and events happening in the natural world, said Freeman.
About a decade ago, Canada Goose had a cold, polar image, said Freeman. Over the past five years, the brand evolved by testing the waters in fashion and luxury. The brand is now trying to fuse those two images together — reconnecting with the outside world and evolving to an all-season lifestyle brand.
“It’s been the natural progression of growing and changing and going from a one season, very specific product offering for a brand, to something that’s much more lifestyle, local,” said Freeman.
The goal is to remind consumers of who the brand is.
“We were built in the north, but we are a brand for all points in nature across the globe,” Freeman said. “From a sales perspective, we hope that kind of love and connection with who we are translates to business.”
