In the ever crowded women's sport style space, competition for an engaged female audience is fiercer than ever. For brands like PUMA, this means breaking through the noise to create authentic, engaging relationships with women who see through traditional marketing bullsh*t.
We set out to gain social relevancy and exposure by connecting with and inspiring women through real, relevant and relatable visual content to create an ongoing conversation around PUMA Women and the power of individuality. Beyond impressions, we wanted build real relationships with our influencer partners and create a steady drumbeat of conversation around PUMA Women and the #DoYou movement, with a clear focus on frequency and engagement.
Our approach was born out of a key, if not obvious, social insight: in today's heated political and economic climate, there's a greater need than ever for us to create deeper emotional and purpose-driven consumer connections to drive true brand loyalty.
Given PUMA's roots in street style and performance, we recognized the brand's authentic right to be an attitudinal champion for female empowerment by supporting women to feel, look and be their very best selves at all times. Using PUMA Women's #DoYou positioning and ethos, we tapped into this cultural energy, identifying and recruiting groups of female friends, all socially influential, and all from different subsets of culture: artists, models, hip hop dancers, stylists, athletes, lifestyle bloggers, etc.
Women like Cache Melvin, JoJo Gomez, Mary Cake, Sami Miro, and Carmen Carrera (to name a few) who make streetwear look like couture and whose strength, hard work and talent embody everything the PUMA Women stands for.
Over the course of the year, we partnered with more than 40 paid influencers and their 5 closest friends, as well as 50 gifted influencers, to support 25 key PUMA Women sneaker launches.
With each launch, we challenged influencers to post stylistic shots of the product, sharing their personal interpretation of #DoYou and driving their followers to key points of purchase. Through the gifted friend piece, we sought to optimize organic social conversation and value, authenticating our position that we can create a space for all women to be successful when women support other women.
Mapping back to our original program goals of frequency and engagement, the campaign was a resounding success. For the 25 product launches, our influencer partners created 454 posts, more than doubling our program goal of 200 posts and generating more than 2.5 million engagements, 30 million impressions, and 13 million video views on Instagram alone.
However, the most important success for PUMA was developing long-term relationships with our influencer partners and seeing the #DoYou movement come to life, beyond their PUMA posts.
