Improving The Brand Health Of A Global Athletic Apparel Brand

Setup

Too often research can be criticized for failing to be actionable, too expensive, too slow, and can fail to drive the business. This is a case study in delivering across all these dimensions; immediately actionable by the brand team, affordable, fast and scalable and clearly drove impact on the business; resulting in expanded investment to amplify impact.

The Challenge

A global athletic apparel brand was facing the following brand health issues:

• Stagnated sales
• Marketing spend ineffective at boosting sales
• On-going regression of the brand tracker
• Diminished appeal from wholesale partners

The Director of Insights hired Hotspex to deploy behavioral science-led market research to better understand the root cause of its brand health issues.

Why Hotspex?

Originally born out of a global segmentation, the Brand Right Space has been a guiding light for the apprel brand since 2020. “Brand Right Space� is Hotspex’s bespoke deliverable from utilizing the Hotspex Map of Human Motivations and drivers analysis which allows unprecedented focus on the outcome that truly drives behavior for the brand – human emotion.

To make this advertising program scalable, Hotspex programmed and calibrated a platform that allows for easy stimuli upload, rapid field deployment and lightning-fast deliverables; often with results available within 24-48 hours. Over 200 ads have been tested since this program was initiated, with expansion of the testing program planned for the balance of 2021 and 2022.

The Solution

This customized Brand Right Index (BRI) tool is based on the brand’s personalized emotional territory and allows the apparel brand to test any stimuli. The testing tool determines (within 24-48 hours) if ad campaigns, product designs, and even personalities on their celebrity roster are on-brand.

This allows the marketing team to evaluate impact before making an investment, driving up their marketing ROI and significantly reducing missteps. By relying on the emotional territory, the marketing teams could ensure the delivery of consistent messaging across touchpoints and regain market share of the younger demographic.

Outcomes & Impacts

The Brand Right Index tool provided guidance and recommendation to agencies and in-house marketers on various touchpoints across the organization, including:

• Which tone, language and graphics would be best suited for in-store and digital promotions (e.g. selecting e-commerce banners that call-out a sales’ annual or semi-annual nature, versus banners that allude to an “always-on� events).
• Point of sale communications, merchandising, and the design of store mannequins (e.g. placing mannequins in active-wear poses versus inanimate poses to build performance focused mental associations at the point of sale);
• Which product colors and layouts to feature in print and online advertising (e.g. focusing on specific “pop� colors);
• Which celebrity endorsers should be kept or added to the brand roster and how to activate them more effectively.

Building off our learnings lead to the apparel brand optimizing a new, global campaign which had the highest testing scores the organization had ever seen, and creative that better resonated with audiences. Since then, the brand has doubled their investment in our product suite.