During the Parade of Athletes, at every event venue, and at every media opportunity, athletes typically wear apparel branded by their country’s sponsor. Unless, of course, that athlete is a star with a contract with another Brand.
For example, Nike is the apparel brand sponsor for the U.S. delegation, but men’s basketball star Steph Curry is contracted with Under Armour. So Steph does not wear Nike-branded uniforms on the court.
Olympic athlete sponsorship itself is a competitive sport and it involves huge amounts of money.
But what about all the unsponsored athletes who earned a spot and could become the next Simone Biles, Trinity Rodman or Katie Ledecky?
A small sportswear brand came up with a brilliant solution that helped it gain worldwide recognition.
We reached out to CMI’s chief strategy advisor, Robert Rose, to tell the story and the lessons for marketers. Watch on this Video:
The Robber made the Game Uncensored
It’s hard to find total Olympic sponsorship dollars. Sportico reports that Team USA alone has a $2.5 billion corporate sponsorship target for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. It’s a complex investment strategy for brands to figure out which teams, individuals, and sports to sponsor that will get the most bang for their buck.
But one small brand has come up with a unique move in the face of this high-value competition.
Bandit, a small running apparel brand, ran the Unfunded Project. It’s a great example of how marketing can solve a real problem and deliver huge value to everyone involved.
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This is the problem that Bandit solved. Many sports hold qualifying events to see who will earn a spot on the Olympic team. For example, USA Track and Field holds the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships.
At the trials, stars and former Olympians have worn the clothes of their big brand sponsors. But unsponsored competitors have a difficult choice. They can get free advertising for the big brand by wearing their clothes, and potentially reduce their power in negotiating brand deals if they make the team. Or they can wear clothes without logos and go unnoticed.
Bandit, too small to sponsor big-name stars or bet on any one athlete, saw an opportunity. It supported 35 unsponsored athletes in track and field trials, offering an athlete-only line of the same black, logo-free apparel. It also provided the athletes with airfare, hotel and meals for the trials.
And here’s the kicker. Bandit’s sponsorship deal includes an opt-out clause that allows athletes to leave the deal whenever they want. So if they form a team, they can negotiate brand deals with whoever they want.
Why is Bandit doing this? To get to where we’re at now – let’s talk about the running apparel brand.
The campaign was a huge success. Bandit measured press coverage, brand awareness, and impressions across all media types. The CEO said they definitely saw a revenue benefit, but the level of awareness the company generated was amazing.
And amazingly, the brand was present in Paris. It was contacted after the sponsor for the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines withdrew. Now, Bandit is present at the Olympics.
Play a new game to win against competing brands
So what does that get you?
If you are a smaller or challenger brand, you may not be able to outspend or outrank your competitors. Gaining brand recognition is difficult.
But you can be deeper, more trustworthy, more valuable, more innovative, and better than your competition. You can play a different game.
Bandit has found a way to penetrate the big leagues – spreading its marketing investment across multiple small leagues. The athletes Bandit sponsors will always remember how the company solved their problems.
More importantly, everyone who wants to know who did it—who solved THAT problem—will discover the brand. Bandit solved a bigger—or different—problem than what you would normally associate with a brand like yours.
In the early 2000s, I was the CMO of a small software company. No one knew what software as a service or cloud computing meant, and our product was all about web content management.
We competed with companies thousands of times our size, like Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Adobe. We didn’t try to compete head-to-head to sell our web content management product better than the giants’.
We sold a better idea of software as a service. We told the story of cloud computing. That was our differentiation. If we could sell people on that, we could convince them that we could handle a small part of their cloud computing. We didn’t play the product game with the product. We played the new idea game and built trust on that platform.
So what lesson can you take from that and how Bandit stole the spotlight from its biggest rivals at the Olympics? Don’t be better at an existing game, invent a new one.
According to contentmarketinginstitute.com
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