Sports Marketing Summit: ‘Sport is the antidote to a modern and stressful life’: How Rebel became more than ‘the place you go to buy your gear’
Rebel needed to become more than just the place to grab sporting gear during the back-to-school rush - so they decided to shift what sports means to a sports-mad nation.
It’s easy to be inspired during a sporting match. Not surprisingly, sporting gear retailers like Rebel will see sales spikes at all the usual times: AFL finals, during the back-to-school rush, or when the Olympics prompts an Olympic-sized burst of enthusiasm. But what about the rest of the year?
As Ella Goldberg, account director, at The Monkeys explained during the opening session at Thursday’s Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit, the challenge for Rebel was to become more than “the place you go to buy your gear.”
“We needed to be more than that, we needed to be the home of sport,” Goldberg explains, “and we needed people to come consistently, to make sure that our brand was not just peaking at those key moments throughout the year, but we had this steady sort of ownership of what that is, and ultimately drive that participation.”
So, they decided to reframe sport. An ambitious undertaking in a sports-mad nation.
“Traditionally, sport is basketball, tennis, soccer, all the things you sort of play when you’re at school,” Goldberg continued.
“But, probably in the last five years the idea of sport has changed. It’s pilates, it’s yoga, it’s an F45 class, it’s going for a Saturday coffee walk with the girls.
“here’s so many things that sport is now, we needed to shift what that meant. So we sort of landed on this idea that sport is the antidote to a modern and stressful life. Sport is the answer to sort of all of life’s problems.
“It’s how you build self-confidence. It’s how you have a sense of belonging. It’s how you fit in.
“It’s great for your own mental and physical health. It’s how great to connect you with people around you to meet new people. It’s, you know, the relief at the end of a long day.”
Following this line of thinking, Rebel landed on a new “brand purpose”, around the transformational power of sport, and how Rebel “have the opportunity to change more lives through sport.”
This was the creative springboard for work that launched during the Olympics, when inspiration is running high, and prior to this, during lockdown – when exercise and self-care regimes took on a new level of importance.
“Sport has helped people along the way, and ultimately Rebel can be the provider and the supporter of that,” Goldberg said.
“We launched this during the time of the Olympics, when obviously people are feeling inspired and motivated, and they’re sort of looking at all these people on their screens thinking like, ‘I want to get out there and I want to do this’.
It needed to be a complete operational shift – not just a clever commercial.
“Like, it’s great on TV,” Goldberg says, “but we needed to make sure our staff understand the transformative power of sport.
“You need it to come through sort of every single touchpoint of the business, from the store to the EDM to the TV.”
And with the Olympics inspiring people to strive — even if momentarily — the time was right for Rebel.
“We thought this was the perfect moment to show people that Rebel has the opportunity to transform more Australian lives than any other retailer.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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