Puma hopes 2013 will be a pioneering year as it aims to re-energise the brand via a fresh platform – The Nature Of Performance – which underpins a new inspirational position, creative approach and marketing campaign
One of its first new innovative steps is to offer consumers cash to create user generated content to use in its global campaign.
Puma is offering to pay smartphone users and social media fans for their own content –specifically photos of them performing physical tasks.
The German-headquartered sportswear brand is trialling Foap, an iPhone app that enables users to upload and sell their photos to brands, to source creative content.
It has asked Foap’s 75,000-strong user community to take pictures of themselves in response to Puma’s own set of ‘Missions’ – such as scoring a goal or sprinting. These mission/poses are set for consumers through promotions across Pumas own social media channels.
Users then are invited to rate one another’s pictures, although Puma itself will decide which ones to reward with cash prizes.
The clothing, equipment and apparel brand has reserved the option to buy all of the images uploaded and use them in its global ‘Nature of Performance’ campaign.
This co-creation programme is initially be trialled throughout the company’s Nordic region.
Puma argues that it would be challenging to access this kind of content and creative material from traditional competitions.
‘I love Instagram, but it’s difficult to use [for marketing] during competitions,’ explains Puma’s sport marketing manager Rutger Hagstad. ‘With Foap we can create a library of content and achieve further engagement by getting them to rate the images. That’s what we thought was interesting.”
By using consumer generated creative, the sport/lifestyle brand will develop, roll-out and promote new Nature of Performance products across categories with new collections in the football, running, training and fitness categories.
The umbrella idea behind Nature of Performance is that it will act as a thread that ties together all of the brand’s performance categories: thus ensuring a consistent voice, look and feel.
The conceptual thinking behind the Nature Of Performance is that both the brand values and the product functionality are grounded in nature and in the athlete’s innate desire to perform at their best level.
Thus it combines the universal and the personal – and the campaign’s tactics aim to reflect this through user-generated content based on universal missions.
To date, Nature Of Performance creative (the result of a collaboration between the brand and its agency Droga5), spans ATL and BTL platforms and has reflected a set of personality traits through a ‘product as hero’ type treatment.
The message is that the products amplify a consumer’s natural instincts. Thus in the football space they enhance you performance whether you are power-hungry, a speed-glutton or a control-freak. Similar insights have been developed across the golf, training and fitness spheres and promoted via creative executions for each.
The Nature of Performance PUMA Football from SergioAgueroTV on Vimeo.
The print and online ads use a minimal, grey set to stage the technical product features and show athletes in epic, motion moments.
The work included a series of technical films, as well as TV spots which began rolling out in February.
‘With The Nature of Performance, we’ve found our own unique voice within the performance space,’ outlines Puma Director of International Marketing Filip Trulsson.
‘The platform works across all of our sport categories and offers a compelling and effective way to convey pinnacle performance PUMA products and the user experiences at its most natural state.’
Comment
This initiative adds a new, financially-motivated thread to the burgeoning consumer-creative trend.
Several recent blockbuster campaigns and sponsor activations have been built around user-generated content in recent months – think Pepsi’s ‘Beyonce Half-Time Show’ introduction commercial
and Pizza Hut’s ‘Hut, Hut, Hut’ spot in this year’s Super Bowl –
but none have used straight cash incentivisation.
Yet it seems more than fair that if a consumer creates content that a brand uses in its marketing then he or she should be paid.
Are we about to see a wider explosion of creative cottage industries spring up?
Is this where crowd-sourcing, consumer-creation and micro-finance meet?
Links
Puma What’s In Your Nature Facebook App
Puma Football Nature Of Performance
http://www.puma.com/football/news/the-nature-of-performance
Puma Football Nature Of Performance Facebook
http://www.puma.com/football/?filter=facebook
Puma Nature Of Performance Launch Film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVVtiYSo9ow
Puma Website
Foap
Foap Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/foapApp
