Umbro being in the news today prompted me to think back to the brand campaign I was involved with back in the early 2000s when I was the brand’s marketing manager.

With Umbro at that time battling against the vastly bigger budgets of Nike and adidas, our strategy was to underline a positioning of being exclusively focused on just one sport: football. Essentially it was an attempt to take the biggest strength of the competition (size, scale, a presence in every sport) and turn it into a perceived weakness (lack of real focus on the one sport that really matters).

A focused and distinctive positioning

This TV ad (created by Fallon) ran during the 2002 World Cup and was designed to communicate a deep and genuine love for the game – seeing a pair of goalposts where others might just see a fence, a couple of bollards or a garage door.

It was also designed to be an antidote to all of the typically brash, noisy, football-themed ads that always appear during a major tournament (and frankly not trying to compete head-on with the likes of Nike, which would have been pretty futile).

We also ran print ads along similar lines…

We did PR activity with Umbro’s sponsored players – taking them back to where they had first started kicking a ball around – and we even sent a photographer an an epic trip to capture the essence of football from all around the world, turning that into a book (this was pre-Instagram, remember).

While it may seem an obvious move (given Umbro’s long history in football) the decision to make this an overt brand positioning (with campaigns designed to reinforce it) was important.

It gave Umbro at least a fighting chance of standing out against its much bigger rivals, and allowed us to occupy a territory that none of the other major sports brands could claim, no matter how many players or teams they signed up.