Reaching Consumers
Written by Lilah Halbkat, Xiaolu Lin, Xinyue Liu, and Yue Chen. View our consumer profiles here.
Athlete Sponsorships
For brands like Under Armour that are heavily focused on athletics, athlete sponsorships have become the standard for grabbing the attention of younger consumers. Big brands like Under Armour spend $1.6 billion on endorsements every year, and it’s not just because brands want to see these athletes succeed. The current UA Athlete roster includes a wide range of athletes from football star Cam Newton to Gisele Bündchen, famous model and athlete. By using athletes that possess similar values to the brand’s consumers, the brand can correlate themselves with values such as passion, strength, and innovation.
Hiring a world class athlete to talk about performance apparel can also result in an obvious boost in credibility. Using ethos to gain valuable positioning in a consumer’s mind can be seen in all product marketing. For example, Aveeno uses Jennifer Aniston’s glowing skin to sell Aveeno lotion, and Under Armor uses Misty Copeland’s incredible ballet success story to promote bras, leggings, and bodysuits.
It makes sense with the huge success of these sponsorships that Under Armour could use this to target our consumer persona Alice. She is a college aged skier who enjoys looking for innovative apparel. Using a world class skier like Lindsey Vonn to promote UA coats, jackets, and ski pants would add credibility and appeal for consumers like Alice who may be more prone to follow her idols on digital media channels.
Xiaolu Lin: Instagram
Instagram welcomes younger consumers and early social media adopters using pictures, short auto-play videos and hashtags. There is a daily upload of around 200 million photos on Instagram in 2017. Due to purely visual content on this platform, it is especially efficient for marketers of brands in the B2C sector, because the visual communication is targeted majorly to the emotions of users.
A describing characteristic of Instagram is the categorization of posts through hashtags. It is actually possible on other Social Media channels to use hashtags, however, nowhere as frequently as on Instagram, where every description of a video or picture contains at least a few of them. These special tags have the potential to raise interactions of a post, because all tagged posts can be seen by any user of the platform, even those that are not your followers.
Under Armour has its own unique hashtags as well, which include #IWILL #Rule yourself and so on. These tags help Under Armour define its own unique brand. At the same time, these hashtags seem like the invitation for followers to interact with company. Statistical data shows that Under Armour’s Instagram account clearly gains higher interactions compared to other social media accounts. These hashtags help Under Armour generate higher brand awareness.
Moreover, using quotes by inspirational athletes is also a good way to reach consumers, And it’s will much easier to build brand trust through celebrity trust. Therefore, in this content we created, we chose to post a quote by Lynsey Dyer, an American freestyle skier and big mountain skier, in order to inspire and reach ski lovers like our brand persona Alice. We made sure to include Under Armor’s unique hashtags to build awareness and create interaction with consumers.
Yue Chen: Facebook advertising:
Facebook is an American for-profit corporation and an online social media which was launched on February 4, 2000. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users as of June 2017. As of April 2016, Facebook was the most popular social networking site in the world, based on the number of active user accounts. But according to the survey result by Global Web Index 2014, the active users from the age of 16–24 has decreased 20%. And according to comScore, the US adult users of Facebook, less than two-fifths of users are young users between the ages of 18 and 34. So advertisements on Facebook maybe mainly target to those above 34 years old like the consumers of Under Armour Hunt, Allen.
Most of the UA’s ads on Facebook are with illustrations, and they usually match pictures or videos to explain their items and attach links to that item. So that when customers look at the ad if they like the goods they can purchase them directly. In addition, they also add some tags on the description or add other related tags to expand their Facebook posts attention. Most of UA’s video ad are not only attract customers to buy their products, but also encourage people to do anything they had never tried.
https://www.facebook.com/UnderArmour/videos/10153882051996287/
https://www.facebook.com/UnderArmour/videos/10153864597701287/
For example, these two videos with UA’s tag #IWILL encourage people “Go where you don’t belong.”
Besides, Under Armour has an independent account of Under Armour Hunt which mainly posts ads about hunt. That allows older consumers like Allen to directly find the information about the product they care and do not need to filter from those lots of post about all products every day.
Xinyue Liu: Weibo post
Sina Weibo (called Weibo as following) is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. It is one of the most popular social media sites in China, in use by well over 30% of Internet users, most of whom are young people, with a market penetration similar to Twitter. By the third quarter of 2015, Sina Weibo has 222 million subscribers and 100 million daily users. About 100 million messages are posted each day on Weibo. As of June 2017, Weibo has over 361 million monthly active users.
Under Armour’s Weibo page has above 364k followers. Most of the posts on Weibo are translated from Instagram or Facebook. And there are some posts mainly target to Chinese consumers or foreigners who live in China. For example, most of the posts are attached the link of Under Armour official online shop in China. As mentioned before, Lindsey Vonn’s great success with the sponsorship of Under Armour can attract young people who like skiing like Alice. And those great success are translated into Chinese by Under Armour Weibo page, attached with her photo and interview video, which can attract ski lovers from China who like Vonn and want to be the next Vonn.
