This collaborative trend of doing activewear took off thanks to the millennials who were attracted to the luxury market but wanted it accessible. Through major subculture collaborations, luxury brands saw the opportunity to readjust their image and reach a new audience.
Streetwear and sportswear became soon enough the style younger generations were going for while still dreaming about luxury clothes. Sportswear brands could thus take advantage of this need also to meet and satisfy this fantasy.
By collaborating, brands mix their values, and the emotions the customer will feel will be new and will reach a new level in their imagination.
You were able to read a little bit about collaborations between sportswear brands and high fashion designers in an earlier article. I thought it would be interesting to focus on one of these collaborations to know why it works and how it impacts the sportswear brands.
With a very interesting tool called Digimind, I was able to analyze the collaboration between Casablanca and New Balance. And here is my review.
As you can see, there is a spike of mentions in April 2020 when the brands launched their collaboration. The most reactive countries regarding this announcement were the US (20%), France (10%), and Tokyo (7%). Why these countries? Well, because New Balance is produced and comes from the US, Casablanca was founded by a Franco-Moroccan in Paris, and Japan holds a big fashion week each year.
Looking closely and selecting the top cities tool on Digimind, I was able to confirm my thoughts. The main cities where the collaboration was popular are Paris (11%), Tokyo (11%), New York City (9%), London, and Madrid (4%), all known for their fashion weeks or fashion industry.
For this first launch, the top hashtags were #newbalance with 124 mentions, and #casablanca, #sneakers, and #newbalance327, respectively mentioned 86, 55, and 45 times. In addition to that, the famous sports analyst Darren Rovell who has more than 2 million followers person relaying the information the most on Twitter, followed by GQ Magazine.
Thanks to that launch, the hashtags used and people relaying the information; out of 42 million people reached, 64% were men and 36% women whose interests were mainly sneakers and streetwear. Their satisfaction towards this collaboration was very high (78%), and this might be because of the positivity around the collaboration. For example, Yahoo wrote an article talking about “why fashion-athletic collabs will still win despite the Coronavirus” or one complimenting the shoes.
As you may have seen on the first graph, there are three other spikes following in June, September, and November, right after the launch of the “Idéaliste” collaboration. It is because both brands took advantage of the new interest towards them working together to announce the launching of brand-new colors for their shoes; giving a new meaning to their collaboration. “Sometimes more is more” was thus launched on September 12 exclusively online. In order to satisfy as many people as possible, and keep being in the mind of the consumer, a second wider release happened on November 20.
What changed from the first spike?
The first thing changing from the first launch is that France was the city where you could hear the most about the collaboration (17%) whereas New York City was not as active as the first time (5%).
Furthermore, on Twitter, the account Kicks On Fire who was the third account speaking about the brands at first is in the first place for this second launch. On Facebook, several accounts of the New Balance brand this time talked about this second collaboration when they had not done so the first time.
Another difference is the emojis related to both stages of the campaign. The first launch was mainly associated with an orange for the influences of Casablanca (Morocco), the eyes for the innovation he shoes represent; the second launch was associated with the flame for the fashion aspect of the shoe and the camera for its use in a very popular environment.
To see if this campaign had an impact on the brand, I chose to look for “New Balance” alone and compare the chart to the first one with the same dates and metrics.
I have been able to note that the brand alone has much higher rates in terms of authors, mentions, and reach, meaning that the campaign did not have any impact on the brand.
One aspect that can explain that is that the brand made very little communication about this collaboration on its social media accounts which might have made it look random for a lot of people.
In a nutshell, thanks to the Digimind tool, we had the chance to analyze the campaign realized by two brands and the impact it had on New Balance. When looking in general at the campaign, the opinion was in majority positive, and big media talked about it. The campaign did not have a huge impact on the brand itself, maybe because it is a very active year for New Balance. In fact, at the same time as this collaboration, they launched another collaboration with the famous Jaden Smith and some athletes they are sponsoring (for example Coco Gauff).
References
(2018), When Luxury teams up with Sportswear, Heuritech. Retreived from https://medium.com/heuritech/when-luxury-teams-up-with-sportswear-a8c4dfcb1c74
Corentin Saguez (2020), Casablanca présente sa deuxième collaboration sneakers avec New Balance, Views. Retreived from https://views.fr/2020/06/17/casablanca-presente-sa-deuxieme-collaboration-sneakers-avec-new-balance/
Victor Deng (2020), Casablanca's New Balance 327s Get a Wider Release, Sole collector. Retrieved from https://solecollector.com/news/2020/11/casablanca-new-balance-327-release-date
Digimin, Historical search. https://search.digimind.com/ds/aq9/dhs/
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