High Altitude Marketeering

In researching a piece for SNEWS on how outdoor brands use expedition stories and images to define themselves, I connected with an Australian academic doing work on the ways sporting goods brands incorporate athletes and sponsorships into their marketing. While much of his work relates to brands partnering with professional sports teams, he has an interesting section on surf brands and their use of athletes and imagery. He could just as easily be describing the outdoor market:

Quiksilver sponsors major surfers and events on the World Professional Surfing circuit and understands that consumers can transfer personalized meanings of the sport to the brand. The Quiksilver brand accompanies images of surfers on high quality (sometimes thunderous) waves with very discrete use of the logo. They are most fussy about these images as they recognize how pivotal they can be in encouraging consumers to associate the brand with what they cherish most about the sport. That might include meanings associated with the search for the perfect wave, the freedom and flow (joy at being in the moment) that comes from riding the wave and communing with nature, or other notions around spirituality and how it is uniquely understood by the individual in the context of the surfing imagery.

Significantly, where major surf brands were once lauded for their ability to use sponsorship to attach themselves closely with the sport, there are ample signs that they too are driving hard toward sameness. In their desperate (and often conservative) attempt to be perceived as the most authentic, surf brands like major political parties, have gravitated to a homogenous centre in the way they attach the brand to sport. Major surf brands such as Quiksilver, Billabong and Rip Curl will often adopt the minimalist approach in their communication and product design. They use images of a surfer and wave and little else which can be powerful in that they may prompt the consumer to emplace themselves in the cultural scene and personalize meanings, yet when all the brands are relying on very similar sport assets there is often little that sets them apart.

It is our belief that surf brands will fare better if they embed themselves within the more unique stories and meanings that makes surfing culturally distinct from other sports including similar board sports like snowboarding and skateboarding. For example, an appreciation of freedom sits at the heart of all sport subcultures so it is imperative from a Values Transfer perspective to evoke what distinguishes what freedom (and other cultural assets) means to a surfer in a highly engaging and nuanced way. This approach will bring subtlety and strength to associated brand meanings. Before elucidating examples of what such an approach might look like it is worthwhile developing the point further.

From a draft of “4^th Generation Sponsorship: Values Transfer,” by Francis Farrelly, Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia