Adventures in Sports Marketing
Marketing for the sports and recreation industry is probably the secret dream job of most marketing and advertising people. It has to be more fun than selling valve actuators, right?
Q & A ad for Terry Cycling’s bike seat with a “comfort” hole
In 1999 Terry Cycling, a women’s specific bicycle manufacturer, came to me for help launching their expanded line of saddles “with ergonomic holes.” Their ideas were being exploited by larger bicycling companies and they needed to answer the competition to hold their market share. My campaign, using question and answer analogies (of a concrete block, a razor blade, and an ornamental cactus as the “questions”) was so successful that they sold out of their production six months ahead of schedule.
Billboard for Park Ave Bikes
Park Ave Bikes is a small chain of regional bike shops. After experimenting with a variety of media, outdoor billboards proved to be the most cost effective way to reach customers. The “Get Fit” campaign worked on several levels, from promoting the exercise benefits of cycling to the careful bike fitting procedures that distinguish Park Ave Bikes from the big-box Walmarts and Dick’s.
Frozen Granular, a micro-website built to speak to the top fifty ski industry executives.
In 2001 I teamed with Nelson Kunkel, of nthology (located in Vail, Colorado), to break into the ski industry market. We had determined that ski advertising was alienating its prime audience. Because most ski ads focused on the “extreme” rather than the experience, mere mortals were becoming too intimidated to go skiing.
We built a “micro-site” for the purpose of getting our message out to the top fifty ski industry executives. To get these executives to visit the website, we sent them a series of provocative postcards:
One of a series of postcards sent to executives to get them to visit frozengranular.com
We did snag Fischer Skis as a client, at least until their European bosses reined them in and imposed German ads for an American market…
One of our ads for Fischer Skis
I found mixed success with the sports and recreation industries. Many of the companies are struggling, and key people turn over too frequently. And most of the smaller companies rely on formulaic “its the way we’ve always done it” strategies. Ultimately, it is probably wiser to sell more valve actuators and enjoy sports and recreation for their own merits.