Yesterday I wrote a post stating that New Balance has not been utilizing a multifaceted approach to marketing. In the post I wrote that they were relying too heavily on the athlete to carry the narrative of the brand. I also explained that they have an alignment of stars and should be constantly working to capitalize on the stories around the stars.
New Balance is Making the Type of Marketing Decisions that Propelled adidas Four Years Ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWmoME64Y9A
Marketing is hard. Marketing is very hard and it doesn’t happen for a brand, site or business with a few moves. Only a novice playing a seasoned player can lose a chess game in less than five moves (okay that wasn’t the best example), but you get what I’m saying.
Below I’m sharing two of the slowest months traditionally for this site. June is the end of the school year and typically a slow month in retail as well. Summer vacations are in full effect and a lot of website traffic drops across the board. In 2015 I was beginning to build the strategy for making ARCH the CNN of the sneaker industry. The average unique visitors monthly on the site is right at 20,000 in 2015. In June the traffic tends to drop considerably. It’s even more when I focus on reselling shoes which I did last month to hit a million in sales via StockX.
| Month | Unique visitors | Number of visits | Pages | Hits | Bandwidth |
| Jun 2015 | 2626 | 5361 | 18947 | 60130 |
| Jun 2019 | 10349 | 20779 | 79665 | 343497 | 19.87 GB |
It’s hard to get charts to align on WP, but I hope what you see above makes sense. In 2015 I had a quarter of the traffic I have today. This has been a four year process in one of the most difficult situations. There hasn’t ever been a serious sneaker industry site. I’m building a new form of media that requires considerable research and writing on a daily basis. There isn’t a budget that can prop up the site. Now compare this traffic to a site that I helped to build, Housakicks which focuses on sneakerhead topics, colorways and releases, buy to flip, numbers of limited drops available… at over 100,000 unique visitors, and you understand the difficulties in establishing a culture for something is a bit more serious. New Balance is a more serious brand and trap beats with short athlete videos, even when you use a Jaden Smith song (he should not be included in the marketing with the athletes. He has some lightweight Kanye potential, but that’s another subject) simply doesn’t resonate.
Why am I saying this?
It took 4 years to build a sneaker industry news website in a market dominated by Hypebeast and Complex and those sites garner a million unique visitors per month. This 4 years for ARCH was without a budget and had to take place while also reestablishing a sneaker resale business. In that time I’ve been interviewed by established news outlets and I’ve consulted retail outlets as well as been invited to speak on panels. This was not a five move strategy. It’s been a consistent, daily attack that required an understanding of what ARCH is. ARCH has a culture. It took four years and it’s just beginning to grow.
New Balance is 3-4 Billion dollar company with over 5000 employees. They have a marketing budget and as evidenced by their YouTube they are actively building content, but a quick look at one of the recent posts:
Shows that they are missing on so many points and the video at the lead of this post really shows that there is something missing in their marketing department.
This is easy for me to say on the outside looking in and it really sucks to write these type of posts, but if my goal is to be an educator and consultant/watchdog this has to be discussed right?
Neither of the videos on this page are reflective of what New Balance is (in my opinion). It’s one thing to create content, it’s another thing to understand who your market is and create content that will resonate. In both of these videos you have music that doesn’t quite capture what New Balance is. At the core New Balance is the dad shoe, grey Steve Jobs brand worn by Tiki Torch white kids with execs who support the Trump administration.
None of that is exactly true, but that’s how consumers see the brand.
The reality is, this is a brand who has signed in the last year more Black athletes than they have probably ever had under contract. It’s not just Black athletes they’ve signed. They have a bevy of Latino/a athletes sponsored and the work they have been doing in communities is impressive.
The brand has posted over 30 new videos in the last 6 months and the most impressive and consistent is the PENSOLE x New Balance video below:
With all of that said, it becomes painfully evident when browsing their social and YouTube that there is something missing. Stephen Green @PDXStephenG, made a statement yesterday and it became the foundation of this post:
There seems to be a chasm between how they are perceived vs. how they perceive themselves. Getting folks like Coco & KL is great but if the people slanging shoes in stores aren’t buying it then how can they close the gap?
How does New Balance close the gap? This was my response:
Closing the gap shouldn’t be an issue, but it seems that every brand knows what should be done, but they aren’t doing it all. Nike is and that’s why I wrote about how agile they are. New Balance is a private company and should move much faster, but the disconnect is real.
I’m sure New Balance employees will read this and will feel that I have no idea what I’m talking about. You know what? They will be right. I don’t, but I’m on the outside looking in. You know who else is on the outside? The customer.
Perception is reality and I don’t think that can be argued.
