Puma

The co-creation process injected youthful, divergent thinking into Puma’s strategy and provided five distinct concepts for the brand to take forward.

Background

Celebrity brand ambassadors have long been employed by brands to promote their products.

In today’s society, this type of promotion is particularly abundant on social media; the online world is busy, but celebrities can cut through the noise, and use both their image and platform to deliver specific communications and messaging to consumers.

They boost consumer awareness, perceptions and consideration, making them an important marketing tool.

This research was originally conducted by YouthSight, now part of Savanta.

The Challenge

Sports and lifestyle brand Puma often uses celebrity ambassadors to appeal to a young audience. They were aiming to raise the profile of two of its ambassadors, rapper Professor Green and Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero.

Key questions from Puma included:
1) How did young people view these figures?
2) What role did they fulfil for the brand?
3) How could Puma get more out of these kinds of sponsorships?

Our approach

To begin with, we ran a three-week insight community of young people, to find out their perspectives on celebrity brand ambassadors, including what they liked or disliked about them, and what comes across as authentic or inauthentic?

We then ran our Bright Young Minds co-creation programme, which involved smart and creative consumers to work with us and our clients on new concepts. We began by crowd-sourcing ideas, then gradually refined these to identify areas for creative exploration.

Finally, our young consumers met the Puma brand team and PR agency for a co-creation workshop

The outcome

The co-creation process injected youthful, divergent thinking into Puma’s strategy and provided five distinct concepts for the brand to take forward.

In addition, Puma implemented two sponsorship engagement strategies that helped raise the profiles of their sponsored celebrities’ roles as Puma ambassadors, gaining the brand more value from its sponsorships.