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| Lady Foot Locker spot has singer Mary J. Blige (center) dancing over Reebok Classics. |
Any shoe marketer will tell you that it's now a mixture of sports and music motivating teens to buy athletic footwear. Nowhere is that more evident than in the new crop of back-to-school ads from Foot Locker Inc.
The ads from AKA Advertising, New York, for Foot Locker, the nation's largest sports specialty retailer (with 1,500 stores), and its Lady Foot Locker and Champs Sports divisions, blend music-video styling with a combination of athletes and hip-hop artists.
Rival retailer Foot Action is claiming in some of its marketing "We got it, they don't," a thinly veiled reference to Foot Locker's strained relationship with Nike.
Foot Locker responds in its newest campaign by returning to its roots and making its "striper" sales associates the focus of much of its advertising. In one co-op TV spot for an Adidas basketball model, a customer asks a store striper to find the Adidas shoes in a different size. We follow the sales associate into the back, to discover he has to traverse a series of ferocious hoop games before he can reach the stack of shoes.
"Research told us stripers are one of our best brand attributes — customers go to them to find out what's new in fashion and music," said Foot Locker senior vice president of marketing Stacy Cunningham.
Another Foot Locker TV ad is a takeoff on a martial arts film. In it, one combatant must go to Foot Locker, because he is disgraced by his would-be opponent's "weak shoes."
Music and motion are at the core of a pair of ads for Lady Foot Locker. A co-op effort for Reebok Classics features singer Mary J. Blige in a stylized tribute to the retro appeal that's at the core of the recent surge in retro sneakers.
A co-op effort for Adidas that tries to emphasize the fashion side of Lady Foot Locker shows a moving airport sidewalk ("Now boarding, people with style") that turns into a wildly choreographed scene of women gyrating in their trendy shoes and apparel.
"As a retailer, your biggest challenge is blending your brand message with the message of the brands you sell, and now we've got to balance that with the mixture of sports and lifestyle our consumers want," Cunningham said.
In one of its ads, Champs Sports combines the NFL's Barber twins, Tiki and Ronde, with musicians from its recent deal with Universal Motown Records.
Champs also is debuting a "Sportsville" concept in all its advertising. Sportsville (population SRO) is an embodiment of the retailer that will serve as a platform for all of its marketing.
A Champs Converse ad, the first TV effort in years for the brand recently bought by Nike, is a rhyming ode to Converse's legacy as the original basketball sneaker:
"Before the hype and before the dunk.
After the rhythm but before the funk.
Before the money and before the fame.
Before the new and the old school.
Before school had a name, there was only the ball and the soul of the game."
