Football culture? Umbro’s made for it

03 December 2009 | By Louise Jack

When sportswear brand Umbro agreed to a surprise £285m takeover bid by Nike in October 2007, its new owner was presented with something of a problem. Here were two businesses that operated in similar spaces and the two brands had to find a way to sit alongside each other in a complementary, rather than competitive, way.

The solution sees Nike focus on professional sports performance, while Umbro is building a new identity based on engaging consumers at points where football and culture “collide”.

Umbro global chief marketing officer Trevor Cairns explains the thinking behind what the company refers to as a “brand reset”. “We stripped Umbro down to the core pieces of DNA that have always been present in the brand.”

Cairns says the brand is now aligned on three axes – its enduring presence in Manchester, where it has been based for 85 years; the brand’s sole emphasis on football as a sport for all of those years; and Umbro’s background in tailoring. Cairns explains that Umbro’s founder, Harold Humphreys, was a tailor, who expanded into sports tailoring.

“That history gives us the essence of the brand. We are an English football tailoring brand, that is our unique point of view,” says Cairns. He points out that although Nike itself has a high profile within football, the brand has only been in the sport for about 15 years and is focused on producing high-performance product innovations for the field of play.

Umbro’s revised brand is focused on “where football and culture collide”. Cairns explains: “Football is the biggest shared culture in the world. Whoever engages with the game, Umbro can have a conversation with them. Nike is more focused on the guy who plays and trains three times a week.”

Cairns explains how the Umbro perspective – where football and culture collide – works in practice. The idea is to identify genres of culture, such as art, music or politics, and create a dialogue with that particular audience.

Kit launch

 

The brand’s initial forays into the strategy was the launch of the new England kit in April 2009, a contract considered by many as the jewel in Umbro’s crown.

“We wanted to make the product more than a football shirt; we wanted to make it a part of popular culture,” says Cairns. “And we wanted a comment on popular culture and what Englishness actually means.”

The English population is made up of more than 200 ethnic groups and Umbro took one member of each group and got them together for a photo shoot to make a visual statement about Englishness. The idea was to create a commentary on the nature of being English, which Cairns describes as “colliding” football with social issues or politics.

Another more recent launch was that of the Manchester City kit. The brand “collided” Manchester City with Manchester’s musical heritage with bands such as The Stone Roses and Oasis. Cairns says: “We treated the release of the shirt like an album launch.”

The brand’s latest initiative is a clothing collection called Football Wardrobe, which Cairns describes as a “very vibrant, colourful kit”. To promote the range, the brand has entered into a partnership with the band Kasabian. Cairns explains: “They had a single coming up, and we heard they were producing a viral that was going to be a parody of the Guitar Hero video game but as ‘Football Hero’.

“The principle of gaming, football and music colliding gave us the angle. We worked with Kasabian to support them on the viral and placed some product as well. So Umbro got a really nice story.”

But even with this new perspective, the two brands must inevitably overlap at times. Cairns admits: “At times, there is going to be a degree of tension because both brands are on the field of play, but our focus is entirely different.”

Cairns is in a good position to differentiate Umbro because of his in-depth knowledge of its parent brand. He has spent nine years with Nike, heading its football marketing in Europe along the way to becoming Nike’s general manager for football in the UK in 2007.

He joined Umbro in November 2008, initially as general manager for England, with responsibility for Umbro’s England kit and creating a strategic plan for the business. In June this year, he became Umbro’s global chief marketing officer.

Cairns says the Umbro marketing team has been given plenty of freedom from its larger sibling brand and the marketers have benefited from a huge amount of advice and support from Nike, not to mention the not inconsiderable resources available to the company. He says: “It’s hugely important for Nike as well, of course.”

The complementary positionings allow the company in effect to sell twice to the same customer. A person could be a Nike customer and also an Umbro customer for completely different reasons.

“You could be the player who wants the latest, lightest boot on the market and that would be a Nike shoe. But you also could be inspired by football and maybe want your fashion choices to be influenced by the sport, and there, you’d be an Umbro customer,” says Cairns.

To advertise its clothing ranges, Cairns claims Umbro uses marketing that goes beyond the traditional formula of “player in kit leaning against a goalpost”.

Because it targets discrete groups with its products, based around the core themes such as music or art, Umbro can be more targeted with its limited marketing budget.

Now the brand is using this approach, however, Cairns says that he is already thinking of how Umbro will evolve. “When using a performance-oriented strategy, the marketing always has to go through a ‘player or team lens’, which means it can be a challenge finding a new way of bringing products to market,” he says. “At Umbro, there’s so many different ways to do it, targeting particular groups. The possibilities are exciting.”

When a brand finds itself within a new owner’s broader portfolio, it can be an insecure time for its marketers, but Cairns says the Umbro team found it “inspiring”.

He explains: “We had a chance to define the future of a global brand, for which there is enormous affection in the market and which maybe hasn’t been managed the way it should have been. It was a very engaging and empowering process.”

Brand strategy

The Umbro management was also aware that it was critical to get the new brand strategy understood by the whole business unit as quickly as possible.

Cairns says this became easier after some of the new product launches. “Once we could show a living articulation, through the first launches, I think everybody internally intuitively knew what [the brand] means.”

Another element of bringing the brand reset to life internally was the creation of Umbro’s new Manchester headquarters. Love Creative, which shares Umbro’s creative work with US agency Anomaly, took advantage of the blank canvas offered by the sportswear company.

Love creative director Dave Palmer says: “We understood that this wasn’t about beautifying a premises; this was a media opportunity. It’s a key piece of brand communication. The brand needs to have a conversation with everyone that is involved, be it consumers, licensees, personnel or suppliers.”

Palmer says that expressing the physical identity of a brand through premises is vital when a business changes its proposition. He says that while Umbro has “reconfigured itself for a new future”, the people driving this process tend to be senior members of the marketing team, chief executives and Nike affiliates.

As a result, he says, a lot of decisions are made about which 99% of the personnel at Umbro are completely unaware. “A lot of brands forget to communicate any kind of brand shift to their internal audience. Or when they do, it’s very dry or dull presentation.”

Of Umbro’s HQ, he says: “We went right down to tiny details; it penetrates the entire building. Every day the building speaks the brand message. When staff walk in the office they are reminded what Umbro is and what their mission is. So they can measure what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis with that overall brand vision.”

He adds: “It helps to instruct and educate people, on a daily basis, the kind of company they are working for.”

With retail locations as important for Umbro as its headquarters, the company is also developing new partnerships with retailers that will put the brand in appropriate places for its fresh perspective. Cairns says the brand has just formed a partnership with House of Fraser to stock gift sets of “football inspired” clothing.

“It’s really important for us because it is starting to give us new distribution channels,” he says. This is the first time we’re moving into that high-street fashion environment. Many people who shop there are influenced and inspired by football, so it feels like the right destination for us.”

Since the brand changed its proposition, many retailers have approached the business and Cairns is in talks about expanding its distribution channels.

Two years on from its purchase by Nike, it appears that while Umbro could easily have been subsumed into its parent company’s enormous portfolio, it has actually shaped its own identity more clearly than ever before. As Cairns sums up: “Umbro is not only about the players but also those who watch football and those who are inspired by it.”