adidas Dir of Brand Marketing for Football and Baseball Jeremy Darlow (@JeremyDarlow) went into department store work just after graduating from Oregon State, but quickly realized that he wanted to do something different. "I remember sitting at a meeting with my boss thinking, 'I don't want to be here. This is not my passion.'" That moment led to Darlow eventually joining adidas and last year authoring the book "Brands Win Championships."
Best way to establish your brand via social media:
Approach each platform differently and use what makes them unique to your advantage. Also have consistency and frequency with your messaging. You are going to speak differently in each of those spaces, but you should be saying the same thing.
Keys to establishing authenticity:
Consistency feeds into authenticity. Showing that you’re living and breathing a story or a personality feeds into an authentic voice. As brand marketers, we often fall victim to jumping on a trend or a moment and trying to insert ourselves into the trend for the sake of bringing people to the brand in ways that may not be authentic. Just because something incredible is going to happen at the Super Bowl, it doesn’t mean your brand needs to be there. It’s important for people to realize that and stay in spaces that are authentic to who they are.
The thing with trends is...:
If your brand is on the cutting edge, then that's how you are approaching it, that's the identity you're establishing. You can’t be following a trend; you have to be setting those trends, you have to be ahead of those trends. If you are a mass brand that is speaking to the laggards of trend adoption, it’s OK. If your community has not yet gotten to that trend, you don’t have to worry about it at that point.
Measuring social media success:
These are just platforms to tell a story. In order to ingrain a story in someone’s mind, you have to tell it over and over and over again. Many brands fall victim to changing direction too much. The one analytic I care about most is conversation. I always want to be the most talked-about brand in anything I do. It’s contextual. Conversation to me translates to success as long as your story is authentic.
How social media changed sports business:
Everybody has access to everything now. As someone working on the sports business side, you are looking at how you can create conversation not just with the media, but with fans and consumers. The only reason you are thinking like that is the consumer has an outlet that’s just as strong as sports media.
Brand that you admire:
Beats by Dre. They’ve taken a segment of a business and painted it entirely different with a different brush. Suddenly, headphones are part of your style and a way to stand out.
If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at
jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com
