Reebok Pumps: The Brand Revival, An Art Director’s Perspective

My team and I have been developed a brand revival of a shoe that was forgotten. After doing much nostalgic, childhood soul-searching, we decided to revive the Reebok Pump. In the early 90’s, the height of the Pump’s success, Reebok was mainly targeting athletes and promoting the shoes through the popular athletes of that time. We decided this was boring! This kind of advertisement would never catch the interest of the non-athletic consumers, such as myself. The shoe, itself, is a smart product. Wearers can pump as much air into each individual shoe as needed for the the comfort and support their feet. Reebok’s 90’s advertising: I like the copy on this, but times were changing. Millenial mind-sets were forming, attention spans were getting smaller, and high socks with Pumps never fully appealed to the “cool crowd”. Alas, they were forgotten. In the Early 2000’s, Reebok Brought it Back The YO! campaign went with the same strategy (and the same failure). They attemped to target athletes, particularly tennis players, and still did not reach the masses or the cool crowd. Brand Revival As an Art Director, I wanted to work on something gorgeous; something visually and viscerally stimulating; something that broke away from the old branding and made the shoe relevant. We thought to ourselves, what group of people is considered cool today? Hipsters, rappers, ravers…wait ravers! After doing research and finding what an evolving market this is, featuring unique style and a need for comfortable dancing shoes that fit their culture, we decided this campaign could be beautiful. They are cool, they are trendy and they love bright colors. Take a look at some pictures from Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2014: As you can see in this last picture, our major competitor for comfortable shoes is Converse. Converse allows for many colors, and people tend to draw on them to create unique designs that express their individuality. We decided Reebok would have to do the same, while learning to appeal to this loving and energetic crowd. Here are our print executions. TEAM: Daria Tienbusch (AD), Martin De Ferrari (CW) and myself, Erin Cardona (AD). Visually, we wanted to appeal to the eye and to stand out from traditional shoe advertising. We wanted to show people jumping in cool pumps with bright colors to simulate glow sticks and the laser-filled look of raves. While our copywriter will go into more detail on the writing, he was working on creating that same jarring copy that will stop the consumer and break through the clutter. For digital executions, we wanted to hit our target and emphasize that these shoes were not only comfortable, but could also be customizable beyond colors, but even textures as well (i.e. fur, sequins, etc.) So we created the line PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity & Respect), a popular term amongst ravers. For additional executions, we chose to add digital and out-of-home executions that would allow our audience to get comfortable with this new line of shoes and have fun with the brand they once loved. The following executions are an Instagram or Digital Video for the brand, a promotional OOH execution at raves where attendees can jump to get their new pair of shoes and a Reebok sponsored Spotify channel where our target can listen to the latest hits in electronic music live. [embed width=”500″ height=”281″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a3fZ581Wl4[/embed]   As an Art Director, it is your challenge to try to maintain a consistent look and feel for your brand. I believe, that in this case, we have achieved that look and made it relevant to our target. While every execution may not be perfect (considering we are students and don’t have access to professional videographers, photographers, editors, etc), we hope that the ideas come across in the best way possible. For me, I love this campaign because I relate to the eye-grabbing beautiful visual style that the target will also enjoy.