Reebok on the Rebound?
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posted by One Sport Voice Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi: This blog reflects my critical eye and voice on all things sport. I am a critical thinker, scholar, and researcher in girls & women in sport, youth sport, and coach & sport parent education. |
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So I’ve been offline for a few days and I come down off the slopes from boarding in the Tahoe area to an email from a blog fan (you know who you are!) with a few links to Reebok’s new ad campaign and product line. Please click on these links, but the short story on the marketing tag line for Reebok’s new EasyTone sneakers is “better legs and a better butt with every step”. What?
According to Reebok, American sales rose 4 percent—its largest increase in four years—on the strength of that launch and the goal of the campaign was to get consumers to “reethink” their perceptions of sports “and remember why they play, sweat and cheer—because it’s fun.” I find this statistic a bit troubling.
My question is this—if Reebok’s target market is women who want to buy ‘performance gear’, how does this commerical appeal to women? With this ad, who are they really trying to get to “rethink their perceptions of [women's] sports”?
View Original Post at onesportvoice.wordpress.com
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- Filed Under:
- SportsPLUS, OpEd, Media/Marketing
There is 1 comment on this post. Join the discussion!
madiq
Sounds like the Easytone is attempting to cultivate the health club demographic, of women who work out to be seen as more attractive to men (or women). Given what I've observed to be a commonly-held preoccupation with the size and shape of the butt, it very well may be that for those women, marketing a product to them that makes their butts something to be proud of would be "on target" marketing.
As for the other product, the ZigZag I believe, I'd assume they'd market in a more whimsical style, so as to focus on the fun of exercise, over the gritty competition that leads many women to associate with "manliness." I've seen quite a few women who have expressed misgivings about sports and exercise that seem to be tied to this association. Sounds like Reebok is attempting to market around these biases, rather than change their perceptions, and it seems that so far, it has been working for them.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 4:41pm PST