New Balance is hardly new to the sport as it started a football business in 2012 under its Warrior subsidiary and its entry into the football market was highlighted by its $40 million-a-year jersey deal with Liverpool. But the brand is still primarily known as a running shoe company or a sneaker maker, and its two new silos faced brutal competition. New Balance had to create differentiation and memorability in the cluttered and competitive local marketplace to beat the odds stacked against it and to stand out.

 

Our brief from New Balance was to create a consumer event to enable New Balance Football to showcase the brand’s first range of football boots– the Visaro and Furon and drive the trial and in-direct sales of these two silos to help the brand firmly establish itself at the forefront of the Singapore football market with the target audiences – football obsessed fans.

 

We know consumers prefer to learn about new products and services by experiencing them for themselves or hearing about them from someone they knew.

 

Our strategy was to stage a live event to bring consumers into one-on-one contact with the Visaro and Furon boots in an authentic environment to create differentiated brand experience that would result in brand impact, brand preference or drive product awareness, which will all lead to impacting consumers’ sentiment and consumers’ intent to purchase. It was also important to generate shareable contents that would digitally amplify the buzz beyond the event lifespan to deepen engagements and increase product awareness through resulting earned media and word of mouth. 

 

The two styles of boots are both designed for attack-minded players but differentiated by style-of-play. The Visaro boot is for players who ‘Make Chances’ - players who need to be everywhere at once, they control the game with their vision, making passes that others can’t. And the Furon boot for players who ‘Take Chances’- players who specialise in taking chances and securing victory, they score from nowhere and everywhere with deadly accuracy, striking cleanly and quickly. With the product propositions in mind, our idea was to create a technology-led immersive product experience designed specifically for each of the boot silo to showcase their capabilities in an experiential journey that combined compelling brand contents with high-touch engagement efforts.

 

We set up a New Balance Football experiential hub with easily navigable spaces that transits from open, product browsing areas to intimate spots that lend themselves to focused interactions - all designed to provide a total brand experience in a personal atmosphere, and on direct dialogue with the brand. At every touch point, consumers learnt more about the Visaro and Furon boots through graphical visualizations, video presentations, as well as personal dialogue with the product specialists.

 

A Facebook-enabled product experience that linked the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagged boots wore by the consumers to their Facebook accounts was designed. Consumers choose between two boot-specific experiences – ‘Make Chances with Visaro’ and ‘Take Chances with Furon’ and had their experiences broadcasted automatically via a Facebook status update. Results and photographs of their experience were also shared with their friends — directly from their feet.

 

It was all about combining high touch and high tech into a super-personalized experience.

 

In total, 534 consumers joined the event, 796 product experiences were delivered, and over 20, 000 people enthusiastically enjoyed the event. Based on the consumers’ sentiments gathered, more than 70% of the consumers say they are willing to consider a purchase.