Dick's Sporting Goods: Good Sports

Dick’s Sporting Goods was the largest retailer in the US sporting goods category but it wasn’t a brand – and didn’t want to threaten the global sports giants which are its partners. Isobel Roberts hears how Anomaly New York pitched in to help the chain carve out an identity by using the motivations, experiences and stories of its customers – amateur athletes – to create spots that resonate like a secret handshake between sportspeople.

Rare is the opportunity in the advertising industry to carve out a fresh identity for a 65-year-old brand. Even more unique is when that makeover comes with a multimillion dollar budget and in the highly creative sporting and athletics category. But this is the challenge that the marketing team at US sportswear store Dick’s Sporting Goods and its agency partners have been sinking their teeth into over the past two years. Although the Pittsburgh-based firm is the largest sports retailer in the US, with more than 500 stores across the country and annual revenues in excess of $5 billion, until 2012 the company had relied on an in-house creative team or partnered with other sportswear brands for its creative work.

That all changed, however, with the hiring of a new chief marketing officer, Lauren Hobart, in 2011, who came with 14 years experience at PepsiCo under her belt. Charged with updating the marketing strategy at Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of her major moves was to bring on a retained agency and, after hitting it off in the pitch process, Anomaly New York were unveiled as the brand’s first ever agency of record in January 2012.

“As we continued to grow Dick’s to become a truly national retailer and brand, we felt the time was right to bring on new resources like Anomaly,” explains Ryan Eckel, VP of brand marketing at Dick’s Sporting Goods, “who have a great track record of building meaningful, emotive brands.”

Inventing an identity

Both parties describe the relationship as extremely collaborative and open in nature, and after joining forces they set about cementing an identity for the brand that could then be used as the foundation for a full spectrum of creative work.

“Dick’s Sporting Goods recognised that it was the largest retailer in the US in the sporting goods category and that it needed to be a brand too,” says Jason DeLand, founding partner at Anomaly. “It was fair to characterise Dick’s Sporting Goods as a very successful sports retailer, but at the time it didn’t really have its own brand meaning or identity outside of being just a retailer. It’s a little bit different from Target or Best Buy, for example, as the brands that Dick’s Sporting Goods sells happen to be some of the most recognisable, iconic and creative brands in the entire world. So to carve out a unique space in the context of Nike, adidas, Under Armour, the NFL, Major League Baseball – all of these huge brands that mean so much to people – was a challenge.”

Both client and agency stress that such top-name sportswear brands are partners rather than competitors. Indeed, as a retailer, Dick’s Sporting Goods is a long-time collaborator and stockist of their products, but the company still needed a powerful idea to be able to claim its own space in the market. Not a challenge for the fainthearted, but over the past 24 months the teams have launched a creative cross-section of high-quality work – from anthemic TV spots to branded documentaries to web films – that have transformed the Dick’s Sporting Goods brand into one as exciting as any sports brand out there.

And the key to their brand positioning? Instead of flaunting high-profile sports stars, they’ve put championing those amateur athletes who are doing it for the love of sport at the core of the brand. This focus was first revealed in a 90-second spot, Untouchable, which kicked off an overarching brand campaign in February 2012. Set to the theme tune of classic 90s sports movie Rudy, the spot featured a montage of players and athletes in action, with each scene each building up to its own climactic sporting moment, and carried the tagline ‘When mind, body and equipment come together… you are untouchable’. Directed by PrettyBird’s Max Malkin, it combined high-end production with an engaging narrative to set the brand’s style.

“It’s the top of the mountain in terms of what an athlete can achieve,” explains DeLand, on the concept of Untouchable. “It’s that rare, difficult, what I would even call magical moment, and when it happens you can feel it. You’re thinking clearly, you can feel that your body is powerful, you’re at one with the equipment you’re using, and that is when you feel that you are in that untouchable place where you just know that things are clicking and could go very well. It’s one of the reasons why people play sports and seek to improve, and the great ones that are committed at any level will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Inspirational in tone, the spot celebrated the trials and tribulations of amateur athletes and placed Dick’s Sporting Goods as a partner in the pursuit to reach their best. Choosing amateurs over recognisable sports stars was a no-brainer, says DeLand, while on the practical side the bulk of top-tier talent are already signed to the likes of Nike and adidas, and as a retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods’ history and heart lay with amateur sports.

“We’re trying to capture the purity of amateur sports,” explains Eckel, “and the journey of athletes to become untouchable, as we say in the campaign. Amateurs often play the game for different reasons from professionals. There’s a love of the game that just comes through in those athletes, and that is where our brand has settled. We haven’t ignored the professional side and there is certainly a role for professional athletes – they’re incredibly inspirational, and we have used them in campaigns. But there is also a certain soul to amateur sports that we find really refreshing.”

Keeping it real

As part of its commitment to the amateur, one of the brand’s central themes for connecting with its audience has been to bring authenticity into everything that it does. A standard that DeLand says they test all their ideas by, this attitude reaches right over into the production with the casting of real athletes instead of actors in their films.

This was the case in a baseball spot from earlier this year, Every Pitch (pictured), which starred a young pitcher from California in the central role. Shot by @radical.media director Derek Cianfrance, the filmmaker behind indie hits Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, the spot was filmed in one seamless shot and challenged the typical approach of most sporting ads. Instead of showcasing the glory moment of the sport with a home run, the narrative takes place between two pitches as the fielders call to each other and the suspense grows. Building up to a tense finish as the pitcher flings the ball before the screen cuts to black, the spot delivers the intensity of the game from the perspective of the players.

“In US sports we like to have all these stops,” comments Eckel, “and while they might be a break for the fan watching, for those athletes it’s an incredibly tense moment getting ready for the next play. I think when we show these moments it is kind of like a wink and a secret handshake between athletes, and we feel that’s a compelling way to grow the brand while retaining its authenticity.”

The brand followed Every Pitch with Every Snap, a similar take but with the action transported to the American Football field. Again, the tension crackles as two teams prepare to face off against each other in the build-up to the next play, with coaches shouting and players pumping each other up.

Moving away from team sports, golfing spot Swing Your Swing demonstrates the brand successfully uniting professional and amateur as a voiceover by golf legend Arnold Palmer encourages players to embrace their own style, just as he did.

Beyond pure performance, Dick’s Sporting Goods has also been tapping into the emotional side of sport, notably in a festive spot by RSA’s Jake Scott called The Glove. It tells the story of brotherly love through a treasured baseball glove that is eventually passed down from older to younger sibling, and highlights the emotional connection that sport can bring. But where the brand has really been able to bring this idea to the fore is through its longer-form work – something that has been central to the content strategy.

“Some stories require enough airtime to be able to resonate properly,” says DeLand, “and I think a mistake some brands make is that they end up thinking they have to tell the story within a 30- or 60-second timeframe. But there are some narratives that aren’t meant for that, and if you do it then you’re forcing it into an artificial medium. What we love about Dick’s Sporting Goods and its ambition is that it recognises this, allowing us and them to explore different ways of telling stories. If you’re a creative person in this industry, to have a client with that much of an open mind is liberating.”

Telling stories with emotion 

One such campaign was Hell Week, a six-part documentary following the experiences of a Tennessee high school football team as it takes part in the gruelling first week of the football season. While the first series launched on the brand’s YouTube page, this year Dick’s Sporting Goods partnered with ESPN to show the second series as part of the channel’s premium programming.

Another project that successfully channelled the emotional potential of sport was a web film series on running, which featured a variety of highly personal stories from amateur runners on their motivation for hitting the streets. Citing the campaign idea as one of the few creative ideas to have stemmed from a focus group, Eckel says the concept came from the realisation that every runner’s motivation is different: “We had the insight that it’s not the commonality that’s the thread, it’s the diversity of reasons that makes these people all get up at 6am when it’s cold and raining, or miss social events, or make sacrifices in their lives. Every one of those people has an incredibly powerful internal motivation to do that, so we wanted to make a series about the diversity of the reasons that people run and each is incredibly personal to the person that is running.”

The subjects of the short films ranged from a cystic fibrosis sufferer who runs to help beat his disease, to a widow using running to help deal with her grief, to a woman who defied race organisers to become the first woman to run in the annual Manchester Road Race in Connecticut in 1961. It’s an example of the scope of content that Anomaly and Dick’s Sporting Goods have been able to produce through their partnership, and in a nod to the strength of their core message they’ve achieved consistency across the work by always bringing it back to the journey of amateur athletes. It’s a central theme that Eckel believes is incredibly rich and fertile for creating emotive storylines – but more than just celebrating the athletes, Dick’s Sporting Goods wants to push its message on the value of sport.

“We want to continue the conversation around the importance of sport and what it can mean in people’s lives, and how it connects emotionally,” sums up DeLand. “Sports matter, and we’re going to be telling more of that story of why and what sports can do for people and culture.”

They may have put non-professionals at the heart of their campaigns, but there’s been nothing amateur about the work from Dick’s Sporting Goods, and with a fine performance out on the field so far, it looks like the brand will continue its winning streak.