08


Fall 2020


COVER STORY


products are shown at the trade show or by a sales rep, the cat is out of the bag. If a product has a particularly interesting story—like the Index.01—media picks up on it and offers readers an advance peek at it. News begins to trickle out in a variety of places, making it difficult to make a news splash when you have something original. Our goal was to create a brand story


around the Index.01 and to avoid the story dripping out slowly with limited impact. By choosing a specific day to unveil the shoe, we could control the narrative of this being a rather momentous occasion in the footwear industry and a story unique to Salomon. The approach fit with our brand sustainability communications strategy as well, which is to consistently tell authentic brand stories about the topic and humbly build credibility over time. To keep the Index.01 under wraps until


our unveiling date, September 3, we asked our national marketing managers and local PR agencies around the globe to keep the shoe as quiet as possible. Any media who heard about it were under embargo until that date. The same embargo was communicated to our internal stakeholders who would play a role in the unveiling of the Index.01—our social media team, athletes and ambassadors, our CRM team, our retail marketing department, and even our HR team, who communicates brand stories to our employees via internal platforms. In the meantime, we assured them we would


provide all the assets they needed to play a role in the announcement of the shoe: • An in-depth press release with insight on how the shoe was created


• Product photos done by our in-house photographer in our in-house studio


• Lifestyle photos of people running in the shoe • A four-minute video with insight from product experts on how the shoe was made (to be shared with media and posted on our social channels)


• Access to our experts for media interviews following the announcement Luckily, the product and lifestyle photos had been shot before we went into lockdown,


needed to be able to gather the experts and the videographer in the same place. With all of us locked down in our homes for 23 hours per day and our offices closed, that was going to be difficult. The key was having everything ready to go—the script, the shot list, the people, and the assets we would use in the shoot—when it was okay to gather people together again. The goal was to create a longer-than-


and I could write the press release from the comfort of my home, with help from our product experts. Given that we were all working from home for most of the spring, the planning and creation of the video asset was a little more challenging. Most of the initial planning for the Index.01 launch took place via video calls. To keep things progressing, we scheduled biweekly online meetings starting in April among the people involved, which included our road running footwear product manager; our footwear sustainability manager; our head of social media; a marketing activation specialist responsible for bringing the shoe to market in 2021; the content manager who was working with an outside video creator on a video shoot that would take place inside our building; and myself, who would lead the PR announcement, organize a lot of these moving parts, and help with script writing for the video. Later, as we got closer to the launch date, we began to add members of our email marketing team and our digital marketing team so that we could drive people to our website—but more on that later. I also used the Microsoft Teams platform for monthly calls with our PR agencies in our biggest global markets, so they knew what was coming. The creation of the four-minute video was the biggest challenge on the list because we


normal (for us) product video that explained why and how we created the Index.01 and how our team problem solved to make it happen. Of course, we also needed to include some of the performance benefits, so we had a lot to squeeze in. The tricky part was that the video had to appeal to multiple audiences. First, it was going to support the press release because we would be pushing it to our media contacts around the world to support their online stories. That meant it had to have more of a storytelling feel than a marketing feel. At the same time, we needed a piece of content that would catch the


We also published it on our internal intranet platform so that employees would share it across their own channels. They were proud to share a sustainability story, and that had a huge effect on our reach, especially on LinkedIn.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20