PUMA Social !AAAA Jay Chiat Planning Awards!

Campaign for Existing Brand!

This is the story of a company that went shopping for an ad campaign and came home with a new category. That category went on to define not only what the brand stood for, but also the products it made, the ones it shouldnʼt and how every member of the company should behave. This case study describes how planning looked at the consumer with new eyes and saw that a new kind of athlete was being overlooked.!

This is the story of bringing to life the joy of sport. !

At the beginning of the 21st century PUMA was again embracing chaos, but this time in its business strategy. After 60 years of producing sportswear, the brand was dabbling in a category it had no right to be in. 40% of revenue was now generated from lifestyle products. But having successfully harnessed the retro revival of the late 90s, it was wandering perilously into the fashion world. Brand clarity indices, which placed them in last position in the category, proved that consumers no longer knew what the brand stood for. !

This was unsurprising given the product line-up. Beyond a couple of new hits at the turn of the century, PUMA was still capitalizing on a football boot from 1968 and variations of the Clyde shoe – also more than 30 years old. During that same 30-year period, Nike had grown into a global colossus with budgets the size of a small country and it had become an unparalleled NPD machine. !

PUMAʼs story is a colorful tableau of chaos and controversy. After exploding onto the scene following a family feud, the company went on to rock its hometown, the sportswear business and the bastion of sporting piety itself – the Olympics. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the company kept its rivals busy by being the sports brand with attitude. !

This lack of single-minded brand purpose was hitting PUMAʼs bottom line and they needed a dramatic fix. In 2008, the company approached us seeking a communications solution. It quickly became evident that communications alone would not be enough to reverse their fortunes. The culture of creative chaos to produce design hits was no longer enough for this global corporation. We recommended that PUMA develop its first truly global brand strategy. But we had a potentially cannibalizing challenge. The key to building a strong brand would be to leverage PUMAʼs sporting heritage without turning our back on the lifestyle business. !

Planning immersed itself in PUMAʼs colorful sporting history. The PUMA athlete had always been a world-class talent, but theyʼd also demonstrated another quality: they truly played the game. They won, and they had fun. These characters – among them Pele, Joe Namath, Diego Maradona and Usain Bolt – were always fan favorites. !

Meanwhile, todayʼs sports world wasnʼt very PUMA. It was dark, overcomplicated and painful. Soccer, the once ʻbeautiful gameʼ, had turned into a commercial entity where players were traded as commodities, running bred fanatical street warriors, and childrenʼs sports-related injuries had reached epidemic proportions. The big brands werenʼt helping either. Nike, sportswearʼs poster child, championed a stern ʻwin at all costsʼ philosophy while Adidas lectured us on the merits of technology. !

Delving into PUMAʼs colorful sporting past, we identified a new space that only they could own in both sport and lifestyle: The Joy of Sport. !

The Joy of Sport is about the sheer pleasure of running fast or celebrating a goal with your mates. In todayʼs sterilized world of sport, the pure unadulterated joy of the game was a huge cause that PUMA could credibly champion in sports and in life.!

Crucially, we uncovered a new kind of consumer that we called the ʻAfter Hours Athleteʼ. These ʻathletesʼ put the joy of sport into life as well as into sport. This generation was brought up on their own sports, nourished on a diet of Super Mario & Foosball. Their phones, TVs, computers and even college coursework had been transformed into playing fields. To them – life was a sport and they were playing it everywhere and every day. !

It was at this discovery that we knew we had a truly business-driving idea. Not only had we defined how we could defend ourselves in our heartland of sports, but we also gave meaning to the large and growing lifestyle portion of our business, one that could inform future innovation. !

The agency invested the spirit of these athletes into a new platform ʻPUMA Socialʼ– which celebrated ʻ lifeʼs athletesʼ whatever their chosen sport – on or off the pitch. !

But PUMA Social was much more than an ad campaign. It was the formalizing of a new category. By recognizing, showcasing and kitting out this formerly overlooked ʻathleteʼ we had cemented the ʻ Sportslifestyleʼ category and PUMAʼs position as leader of it. The new platform would not only align PUMAʼs fragmented product ranges – like their archive collection – but also guide the development of new products. !

PUMA Social provided us with a clear brief for the essential components to make this work:!

Existing products: Previously, the product range had been erratic. Tighter global alignment around the target and the PUMA Social idea provided more structure and meaning to these products & lessened the need for multiple marketing campaigns.!

New gear for our new athletes: By listening to our newly defined After Hours Athletes – we helped to design new products that were faithful to the new mission.!

1.

2.

Social tools and arenas: Building on the targetʼs belief that life is a sport, we developed digital tools that facilitated the sport whenever the opportunity arose. Life Scoreboard allows you to turn any dispute into an excuse for some friendly competition, while a partnership with Foursquare helped consumers turn a night of bar hopping into a competition – complete with trophies that legitimized it. We also created PUMA Social Clubs in which our Social Athletes could get together. !

3.

Finally, we launched all of this with a 360-degree communications plan that exposed the idea of the ʻAfter Hours Athleteʼ to the world. This ran on network & cable TV, in the cinema, online and throughout the world in PUMA stores and other retailers. !

4.

PRINT !

1. Employees & distributors !One of the first and most palpable results was amongst the PUMA employees and distributors who derived a clearer sense of purpose and focus to their activities. This galvanized effort and led to an increase in shelf space, and PUMAʼs local markets began telling the trade the same story for the first time, which provided huge economies. The global CMO of PUMA was quoted as saying, “This idea did more than communicate our lifestyle range, itʼs a big future facing idea thatʼs been taken up by every market.”!

2. Category!There was a renewed sense of energy in the category. The flattering reaction of the competition was an increase in their lifestyle spend – a flurry of brands also attempting to speak to the after hours athlete – not to mention a sudden run on neon (thanks Converse).!

3. Business!And we saw the result on PUMAʼs balance sheet. The activity not only reversed the decline that PUMA had seen over the four years prior, but we saw a massive 10.4% growth in sales from 2009 to 2010.!

4. Brand!And very quickly we saw consumers connecting with PUMAʼs mission –recognizing their own part in the relationship. Among the many positive comments on YouTube, one summed it up: !“Sweeeet. I never realized I was so athletic.” "

In the end, we helped PUMA make sense of the chaos without extinguishing it altogether. We did so by looking at how we could shake up a fairly dogmatic & increasingly puritanical category. And while the competition looked for sports from which it could borrow its cool (like basketball or skating), our approach asked what they were really doing and how we could really help. The After Hours Athlete helped build an entirely new category.!