Planet Reebok: A Higher Orbit

No one ever accused Reebok of dull advertising. The athletic footwear and apparel maker has produced some of the most talked about and successful television and print campaigns in the history of sporting goods.The same couldn't be said of the company's merchandising efforts -- until recently. Today, retail presence is a priority for Reebok and P-O-P use is at an all-time high. And it's a toss up over who's more excited: consumers with their passion for the shoes, retailers with their enthusiasm for the P-O-P, or the creative services people who take delight in creating it.Pump Up the VolumeTraditionally, America's sporting goods retailers weren't sure they wanted vendor-supplied P-O-P and typically employed their own merchandising ideas. As a result, a dichotomy existed. Flashy television commercials and mega-hyped product launches would drive excited customers to a store where the presentation was quiet at best, raucously confusing at worst. While that may remain true for some smaller athletic footwear brands, it's no longer the case at Reebok."Merchandising is critical," says Scott Helbing, vice president of integrated marketing services at Reebok International Ltd., headquartered in Stoughton, Mass. "We spend a lot of money trying to make a statement to the consumer about who we are, but ultimately, the most important three steps they take are when they step up to grab the shoe. We have to present a consistent look, feel and message to the consumer all the way down to retail."While he won't say how much, Helbing admits that Reebok's P-O-P budget has increased considerably of late, "probably even greater than doubled." The company's P-O-P efforts are at a peak right now, he explains, because "We have a clear definition of the brand. We have more SKUs than in the past. And we know what our three focus points are." In the past 18 months, the company has focused its attention on athletes, advertising and retail presentation.Built on fitness and aerobics, Reebok lacked a consistent image across other target markets until deciding to position itself as a performance brand three years ago. Now a slew of athletes spread the word about "Planet Reebok." This year's interpretation of the campaign -- "This is My Planet" -- merges the fitness and the performance ideologies. "We're more about people," says Helbing, while "our competitors are about winning. The campaign is about preparing to win, on your own terms."Image is Everything"When you're spending between $39 and $129 for a pair of shoes, the brand is so critical," says Helbing. He compares the transient popularity of shoe models to beer labels. "Eighteen months ago it was basketball shoes; now it's cross training. Next month, who knows? It's a moving target, but the net of it all is, 'What's the brand on the shoe? What's cool?' We're working hard to make Reebok a cooler brand among teens. One way you do that is through great merchandising."Presenting the brand and the product in the most favorable light at retail is the Holy Grail at Reebok. "If you walk into your favorite store, there's a presence," Helbing says. "You may or may not have seen or heard the television or radio ad we had running, but when you get into retail and make that final decision, the brand stands out as a quality brand -- from the performance it gives you, from the quality of the design elements. All those things come together in merchandising."Reebok attempts to present three images at the point-of-sale: the brand, the product and an athlete who embodies both. P-O-P takes the form of posters, static clings, neons, divider banners for slatwall, shoe forms, director's chairs, acrylic hat shelves, logo-shaped fitting stools, multi-functional cubes in a variety of materials, foamboard shoe and apparel stands and, of course, shoe shelves -- some resembling basketball hoops, broken bats, flags, rocks, aerobic equipment and any number of other possibilities.Retailers express "quite a bit of enthusiasm for our P-O-P," says Helbing. "On a global basis, we spend over $2 million a year just on the design of P-O-P. The more creative you can get, the more retailers will use it and the more kids talk about it."How It WorksAt Reebok, P-O-P efforts fall into one of three categories: corporate (or branded) P-O-P; category-specific P-O-P; and special (event or launch-related) P-O-P. Each category has its own budget.As a new product is being developed, so is the P-O-P. "We're pretty much on the same cycle as the shoes," says Shane Estock, director of creative services. "We're all going down the road at the same time. The shoe people are fine tuning, the ad agency is starting to get briefed and we're having to brief ourselves at the same time." Next month, at a bi-annual meeting, the new products and new P-O-P for Spring 1997 will be paraded past the salesforce.In the past, merchandising development filtered down from product to advertising to P-O-P in segregated steps. "It was hard to explain the timing," says Estock. P-O-P production sometimes started "20 weeks out," she says, while advertising might shoot and air in a matter of days.Today P-O-P is entwined with product marketing and advertising. Reebok's integrated marketing department has three divisions: events, advertising and public relations. The eight-woman creative services department -- whose purview includes P-O-P, collateral and archives -- is a branch of advertising.Associate managers in the creative services department meet with category managers to review marketing and advertising strategies before beginning design. "Once we come up with the concepts, we go back to the categories and present," explains Nancy Gately, associate manager for women's, running, classic, apparel and kids.The Next Big ThingEstock's department consults with half a dozen outside designers and about a dozen manufacturers on a regular basis. "We go outside for 90 percent of the actual design," estimates Gately. Local designers favored by the footwear marketers include Patric Ward Design of Boston, and Merrimen Design based in Holliston, Mass. "We try to meet with new manufacturers a couple times a month," she says. "You never know who's going to have the next best thing."Manufacturers include Advertising Display Co., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; RTC Industries, Rolling Meadows, Ill.; Integrated Marketing Communications Inc., Park Ridge, Ill.; Trans World Marketing, East Rutherford, N.J.; Art Merchandising Inc., New York; and Display Systems Inc., Maspeth, N.Y."Our business is really quick," says Estock. "It's sports and fashion, and that makes it very fickle. There are a lot of times you have to turn on a dime because fashion trends shift. You might be going down a road with Shawn Kemp or Dominique Wilkins and suddenly, in the middle of the season, they switch teams. Every photograph is immediately decrepit. If we're in production with something, we spend a lot of money [electronically manipulating] somebody into a new uniform. That requires vendors who understand the way we work and the culture here."Designs Must Have Legs"Flat" design leads P-O-P development at Reebok. "I think because my background is graphic design, I always feel we have to attack the 2-D first and thoroughly," Estock says. "The design has to have legs; it has to walk a million miles before it's done."Reebok's collateral P-O-P materials are designed to help draw shoppers through the maze of a store to the department where the featured product is actually displayed. "There are some really slammin', 3-D displays that sit in the middle of the floor. Huge pieces. The ones that win the awards," muses Estock. Inevitably, she says, something simpler -- a poster or sticker or window decal or dangler -- must point the way."I feel strongly that if you can afford the time, you need to pull out all the stops and look at every single thing you could do with that 2-D design -- key chains, decals, temporary tattoos. We try to create things that can be used in a lot of different ways."Reebok's designers draw their ideas from the usual sources: cosmetic aisles, car dealerships. And sometimes not. The creative services group has taken a field trip to a children's museum, asked a Disney art director to speak to them, and toured a recycled-materials store where they were given 50 cents to spend creatively.Sometimes it is the shoe that stimulates an idea. This spring, a chiaroscuro P-O-P program launches a group of starkly graphic shoes in various sports categories. "We took our lead straight from the shoes, which in the past we've not done," says Estock. "We'd use a shot of the athlete or something that showed the discipline of the shoe."To be judged successful, a display "has to be relevant to the category or the brand, it has to be within the culture, be current, durable, producible and shippable at a reasonable cost," explains Helbing.Estock's department supplies design drawings on CD-ROM to participating divisions worldwide. "We offer the option of importing direct production from us or our manufacturers, but the more we wrap ourselves around this, we're offering the exact designs on CD," she says.That capability is particularly helpful with the upcoming Olympic program referred to in-house as "spin vector." Reebok's logo is called "The Vector" and in this case it's spinning. "We felt it was critical that countries around the world be able to take our design on CD and insert their own athletes and use their own uniform colors on the point-of-sale graphics," explains Estock.Hardware, Software Work in TandemEstock's creative services office shares a wall and a goal with Stephen Reeds' retail design department. Estock handles "software" while, next door, Reeds is more concerned with "hardware" or fixturing. "There's a large crossover in the middle," Reeds says."In the sports retail trade, most people can't read a plan," he says. "So we spend a lot of our time, once the P-O-P is developed, showing them how to use it [with big, colorful drawings.]"Both departments strive to build flexibility into otherwise universally applicable point-of-sale materials. About half of the company's retail outlets accept merchandising materials out of the box. The large, national chains, however, require special attention."Each retailer wants to look different from his competitor down the highstreet," says Reeds, a recently relocated Londoner."The biggest challenge is to keep the Reebok brand consistent and yet give each of these retailers something that makes sense for them," adds Estock.The shoemaker is slowly convincing its larger retail partners to relinquish more control over presentation. "We're willing to assign people, money, materials, whatever it takes to get the right space within those stores," says Helbing.Reeds is working on a "foolproof" window kit to help retailers show their best face to the world. "Merchandisers have different levels of skill," he says. "We want to create big, strong pieces that an average person could easily put up." To test display simplicity, he says, "We get some accountants to see if they can follow the instructions."Merchandising systems are set up "ABC-style," according to Reeds, to help track their performance. "Retailers are very nervous, and they won't tell you what they're selling out. So we attempt to figure how much we're selling in and work out roughly what they're selling per square foot." Going forward, Reeds says, "We might know that large posters are more productive than small posters; that 33 meters square is a lot more cost effective than 66 meters square, and so on."As Helbing says: "We just keep trying to push the envelope."

Planet Reebok: A Higher Orbit

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