The theme of this year’s Brand Restart conference, organised by Taste Academy in the second half of May at Spojka Karlín in Prague, was courage. Many original ideas on how to move the brand forward were put forward. However, attention was also paid to the courage to admit that the brand was running out of steam, even though the figures showed record sales.
They were convinced that brand awareness stood at around 50% of Czechs. However, data from a survey commissioned by Footshop’s marketing team from Behavio showed that the figure was only 20%.
“I’m not here today with a successful case study. I’m here with a ‘for goodness’ sake, don’t do it like us’ story,” said Klára Lošková, who heads up social media and brand campaigns at Footshop, at the start of her talk.
Four years ago, industry media reported that Peter Hajduček’s trainers empire was laying off a third of its staff and closing five of its eight high-street stores in several European cities, including Prague. Behind the crisis at the company—which, thanks to e-commerce, now operates across all European Union markets—lay not only the Covid pandemic but also the waning trend of so-called “sneaker culture” and the fact that the company had invested almost nothing in brand strategy since its founding in 2012.
No time for branding
Lošková added: “Ten years ago, it was literally the golden age of trainers. Brands like Nike or Adidas were coming to us themselves, asking us to exclusively promote their new models in Central and Eastern Europe, and they were giving us money for events. We used to organise perhaps fifty of these a year, and it cost us nothing from our budget.”
The arrival of the pandemic accelerated the entire e-commerce sector, and Footshop rode the first wave. “In 2021, we exceeded the one-billion-crown mark in turnover for the first time, we acquired our biggest competitor, Queens, and every crown invested in performance marketing returned to us many times over,” Lošková explained.
The internal figures looked great; the success to date had created a false sense of security that the brand was running itself. However, the market for the entire category had already begun to run out of steam, as the “sneaker hype” was fading. According to Lošková, Footshop failed to notice this in time.
The company weathered the crisis not only by streamlining operations but also thanks to its stock market flotation and an injection of funds from investors. “But at that time, we were still putting off investment in the brand. Most of the funds went into performance-based campaigns and paid advertising. We started 2024 with a marketing budget where the proportion spent on brand activities was less than one per cent (nominally CZK 0.6 million – ed.),” added Klára Lošková, noting that at this point the marketing team realised it was more about “live support” on the edge than marketing communication.
From zero to 33 million
If Footshop were to switch off paid advertising overnight, it would immediately feel the impact on its turnover. That was the “wake-up call” the team used to convince the finance director. And it worked. A brand budget of 33 million crowns was already planned for 2025, and media was being bought in-house without any prior experience. For this year, the figure is as high as 49 million.
For their TV campaigns, they teamed up with Zdeněk Pohlreich and Tomáš Hanák, personalities who, surprisingly, resonate with the Gen Z target group thanks to the TV show Ano, šéfe! and the film Gympl, respectively. The brand continues to work on optimising its media mix, this time with the help of a media agency.
“Our CFO showed great courage, because we didn’t have many figures to go on other than how dependent we were on paid advertising. Today, we can see how our brand activities are reducing the cost of acquiring new customers and improving other performance metrics. Above all, however, brand awareness has risen by nine percentage points from 20 per cent in less than a year,” said Lošková, adding that the current ratio of brand-building to performance budget is around 20:80, with the brand aiming for 40:60. However, according to the head of social media and brand marketing, it will take a few more years to get there.
Source: mediaguru.cz