Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world. He runs the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds. He’s also the face – and feet – of Puma. The sports brand wants to emulate Bolt and be the fastest brand in the world.
It has just launched Forever Faster, a global campaign designed to reposition and revive the brand after it “lost its way” according to Jon Yarnall, who heads up marketing in Australia.
Puma is shifting away from the ‘lifestyle’ positioning it has pushed in recent years and is instead returning to its roots in sport.
The brand is a distant third in the global sports brand market, trailing both Adidas and Nike by some distance. Nike’s turnover is five times that of Puma’s, and Adidas’ is six times. So there is a lot of ground to make up if Puma wants to challenge the running order – but it’s going to be a distance race, not a sprint.
The brand is putting its money where its mouth is with plans to triple investment in marketing over the coming year, to 12% of turnover up from 4%, and is committing to a consistent marketing presence over the next three to five years.
It launched Forever Faster with a global ad starring Bolt earlier this month. It’s the first pure brand campaign Puma has run in more than five years. Previously, marketing has been product-led. The Forever Faster tagline will run up to and beyond the Rio Olympics in 2016 with a fresh global brand push planned every six months, as well as additional product focuses down the track.
Yarnall says the change in focus is an effort to “declutter the message” and use the brand’s assets better. Bolt has been an ambassador since his teenage years and has a lifetime contract with the brand, but where Nike’s and Adidas’ brand communications are populated by their respective celebrity sport star partners, Puma hasn’t really made the most of it.
Until now.
Yarnall, a former Nike marketer, joined the brand eight months ago to take on the task of rolling out the global brand positioning in the Oceania market. Puma also appointed Paul Gautier as managing director in the region three months ago to usher in change.
Bjørn Gulden was appointed global CEO of Puma in 2013 and he set about turning the sports business around after a series of sales and profit warnings in 2013. In its most recent results, Puma reported a fall in consolidated net earnings from €18 million to €4 million in the first half of this year. Sales in the APAC region declined by 2.3% in the same period, but Gulden indicated that 2014 would be the start of the brand’s financial turnaround with revived marketing, products and positioning.
The global push comes after the World Cup madness that dominates the sports calendar every four years – a deliberate tactic so that the brand’s message didn’t get lost amid the clutter, says Yarnall.
“We were very strategic about this launch,” he says. “We let Nike and Adidas fight it out for World Cup dominance and we’ve gone later to get some breathing space. World Cup is always a big year for sports brands and every brand, including us historically, would go large for the World Cup consumer. This year we backed off a bit.”
The campaign goes big on traditional channels like outdoor and print but digital, through YouTube, Facebook, social and paid ads, is also a big part of the spend.
The global campaign is the first work out of JWT New York which was appointed by the brand in December 2013, followed by digital shop Digitas LBi in February.
Following the global launch, more localised content will kick off with Aussie sports stars including, NRL player Jared Waerea-Hargreaves.
Only six agencies globally are able to sign off on work for the global campaign and, after a pitch process, Puma has opted to work with JWT Sydney for local work, with the agency reporting into the Hong Kong shop.
The campaign has only been in market for three weeks but the feedback is positive and Puma is already starting to see an uplift in customers being driven into retail partners like Rebel Sports, according to Yarnall.
He says the brand is going after the “game changers” – young people who actively participate in sports, “have a bit of attitude” and “aren’t looking for the standard thing”.
Ahead of the launch of the global TV ad, Puma was the first brand to adopt the new “flock to unlock” ad feature launched by Twitter. It gave users access to watch the global TV ad online two days before launch in return for retweets. The twist was that the content was only unlocked if the number of retweets reached a certain tipping point – to encourage sharing, word-of-mouth and online hype.
Yarnall says: “We know our consumer is looking for new ideas and is tech-savvy so we really tried to get cut-through by utilising new forms of digital activity that was different from the past.”
Forever Faster is the first brand iteration of Puma’s bid to be a big cat – not just an also-ran. Underpinning the marketing is a heavy investment in technology and research and development. There is a host of new products rolling out over the next 18 months, including a barefoot kicking boot that taps into the barefoot running shoe trend. Yarnall claims it will be the “most responsive” running shoe in the market and the lightest football boot in the market at under 100g.
“You can’t talk about being a top sports brand and then bring out mediocre products,” he adds. “It’s all about the technology and the innovation and how it delivers benefit to the consumer.”
This story first appeared in the AdNews print edition on the 22 August 2014.
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