Source: NEW BALANCE AND COCO GAUFF REVEAL THE TENNIS STAR’S FIRST COLLECTION
New Balance continues to roll out collabs utilizing their athletes and celebrating their endorsement of teams. It’s a page from the classic marketing textbook for sneaker companies. That isn’t what’s important here. What is important is how New Balance is balancing their relationships at retail. This is a cool moment for an amazing young athlete, but the real story is the business strategy.
New Balance x Sydney McLaughlin Celebrates Olympic Prowess on an Unlikely Channel
Yesterday, 8-23-21, I wrote the post above about how New Balance rolled out the Sydney McLaughlin Collection with Amazon. I discussed how Amazon perfectly presented the collection via an incredible splash page that both educated the consumer and entertained. Amazon and New Balance combined to execute a smart marketing moment, in what is one of the noisiest spaces in business, fashion. Amazon built an entire page giving visitors to Amazon a chance to learn about Sydney and to learn about the collection. This doesn’t guarantee sell through, but it enhances the opportunity for discovery. Sydney was amazing in the Olympics. Her name is trending high on social media and in search. An indexed page, with metatags and video is searchable and able to be seen by people looking up the athlete. More important, the links on New Balance and in other places deliver a fantastic experience on click through to Amazon.
In direct contrast sits FootLocker. The link from New Balance to FootLocker delivers FootLocker’s “release date” page. There isn’t any differentiation between the products releasing on the same day. Reebok x Cardi B products show up on the same page and on the third scroll on a desktop, the Air Jordan 1 High OG and the Jordan 4 Lightning shows up. This is problematic because Nike products dominate sales and these two products are going to be in demand for any teen visiting this page. New Balance should be irate that they’ve made a conscious decision to deliver this collection to FootLocker, but FootLocker didn’t add it to Greenhouse, which seems to be defunct, and they shared it on Twitter and IG and the response is worthless because the marketing team didn’t create engaging copy. Unlike Amazon, they failed to carry the entire messaging through to their audience. This will diminish the success of the collab. New Balance bears part of this blame as on their own news site (link above at the lead of the story) the page lacks any additional photography/imagery. On the Sydney Collection page on the news site there are an abundance of images to be shared.
Why is this Important?
New Balance is making sure to support both a digital partner with a collection and a brick and mortar/e-commerce partner with a collection. This is an admirable and smart strategy. As retailers prepare to improve their businesses by accounting for Nike’s continued move towards their consumer, stores will have to improve knowledge and interest in other brands for the everyday consumer walking into their doors. As much as I like the people at FootLocker retail, they make a lot of mistakes as a business from the C-suite. They have relied too much on Nike and instead of continuing to provide a service to the consumer, they simply rely on the people shopping to know what they want. Coco Gauff isn’t a known entity to the average FootLocker consumer. She is a niche athlete with 727,000 followers on IG. That’s a lot of people, but if you read my post on Sydney, you know my 10% rule. IG doesn’t convert at a high level. New Balance only delivered the one image used in this post and while Coco’s post of this pic garnered an above average response, she doesn’t even have more imagery available to really entice her followers.
A lot is missing here and problematic, but New Balance did a very smart thing in delivering a collection to a retail partner, but it seems that’s all the brand did and their partner did nothing (as of right now) to truly support the gesture. I’m writing this post because it’s critical for a young athlete to have a successful first collection. I’m hoping that more content will be made available and FootLocker will build a page and campaign to truly highlight the drop arriving on the 26th:
New Balance, together with Coco Gauff, the youngest ranked player in the top 100, unveil the New Balance Coco Gauff Collection, exclusively with Foot Locker Women. Since signing with New Balance in 2018 at the age of 14, Coco Gauff has broken many firsts: she is the youngest player in the history to qualify for the main draw of Wimbledon and is the youngest American to reach the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam since 1997.
The full collection will be available on New Balance and Foot Locker websites starting Thursday, August 26th, with the suggested retail prices ranging from $35 for the Graphic Tee to $100 for the Printed Windbreaker and $89.99 for the 327.
“I loved working with the design team on the inspiration boards and seeing it fully come to life at the photo shoot was a dream come true,” says Team New Balance Tennis Athlete Coco Gauff. “I wanted to push it with the graphics and fit of the collection so I am pumped to finally see it in store and let fans get their hands on it.”
Updated the Day of the Launch 8/26/2021
Launch day (viewed on desktop)
FootLocker added two photographs on the home page, beneath the fold which features a Jordan Zion 1 (a shoe for a ball player not even in season). The imagery has decent copy, but clickthrough is the same lazy pics on a page instead of true marketing: video, who is Coco – tennis is a niche sport and this is a first collab, a post on her accomplishments, etc.
New Balance (viewed on desktop)
Not.a.single.mention.of.the.collection.on.the.homepage… freaking ridiculous.
Now I’m sure someone will state, they shared it on IG and social. Here are the stats for where the traffic on both FootLocker and New Balance shows up:
FootLocker 12.89 Million visits a month. Search =54.39%, Direct = 34.71%, Social = 4.12%
New Balance 6.59 Million visits a month. Search =59.28%, Direct = 30.42%, Social = 2.28%
At some point brands and retailers are going to realize that copy, imagery and indexing on Webmaster Tools is actually the strongest tool in the arsenal and social is non-quantifiable support system. I think it might be time for me to apply to professor’s jobs in business writing again.
