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#InYourName

adidas and the Swedish Football Association (SvFF)

Issue 44 | September 2017

Agency

Edelman Deportivo

Creative Team

Creative Edelman Deportivo

Production Team

Photographer Sven Prim

Date

March 2017

Background

Usually, the launch of the Swedish women's national football team jersey got no attention and sales were low. This mirrored the situation for women's football in the country generally, where half the girls who played the game were considering quitting.

The challenge was to turn the launch of the latest jersey into an initiative that might inspire more girls to take up playing.

Idea

Adidas partnered with the Swedish Football Association (SvFF) to try to change how women's football was perceived. Six out of ten Swedes could not name a single female footballer even though Sweden had one of the best teams in the world.

#InYourName got the women of the Swedish women's team to choose motivational messages and tweets. Instead of their name, these messages were stitched onto the back of their jerseys.

Singer Zara Larsson's quote 'Believe in your damn self!' was on the back of one.

Lotta Schelin, team captain, had on the back of hers: "Don't look down on anyone unless you're helping them up."

The new jersey was unveiled by three adidas ambassadeurs at the Algarve Cup tournament, just a week before International Women's day, in front of sport media from all over the world.

On International Women's day itself, anyone could post a quote onto a couple of interactive jerseys placed on large screens at the Central Station in Stockholm.

The same day the sales started with 10% of revenues to football projects for girl's football.

Results

Of the publicity, 90% was positive and 5% neutral. The engagement on the coverage was incredible. Guardian even made their own case study film on Facebook, with 2,5M views, 25K shares and hundreds of comments.

Nearly every news media in Sweden covered the initiative.

The target audience embraced the campaign with pride. 83% of the people who saw the initiative said they could now find a role model within the team. 76% agreed the jersey was a symbol of pride. 52% felt proud to wear adidas. Appreciation of adidas as an inspiring brand for women and girls was up 15 points and purchase intent was 40% higher among women who had seen the campaign against women who hadn't.

Brand preference was up 16 points and pride in wearing adidas up 22 points.

Or, to quote a young football playing girl: "Thank you for the inspiration and commitment for women's right within sports, even for women overall."

Our Thoughts

Two campaigns in this issue that use the football shirt as out of home media. Walmart (on the two previous pages) used shirts to shift product, adidas, here, to shift perception.

It's interesting, how so often the same idea can happen serendipitously at the same time in two completely unrelated instances.

Trying to narrow the gap in gender disparity isn't just socially sensible, it's sound business.

Male Swedish player Zlatan Ibrahimovic is reported to have earned Manchester United £76m in shirt sales alone. If adidas can start getting girls to buy shirts in the same quantities as the boys, they will be making a ton of money.