As a brand that lives for adventure, Salomon is all about making the world of outdoor sports accessible for all. However, it’s also a brand which traditionally, has more of a male following.
Our challenge was to elevate the female voice within our audience and work towards achieving a more equally weighted male/female community. With the launch of a new line of products created for Salomon WMN, we had an opportunity to engage this female audience, and raise awareness of our new collection.
Over the last 12 months Salomon have been pursuing a diversity goal in terms of gender representation in their social editorial. Our social publishing strategy set the target of reaching a 50/50 representation of male and female athletes showcased on Salomon's social channels. With this strategy we have increased Salomon’s total engagement, on content featuring women, by 40% YOY.
This 50/50 gender representation of athletes has also grown our female following by 18% YoY. Therefore, we knew that Salomon’s community was a perfect place to celebrate women who love the outdoors and don't sign up to the traditional and tired female stereotypes. We identified a real opportunity to challenge the plethora of over generalised images of women we see emblazoned across social channels.
At its core, Salomon WMN, is a drive to be a more legitimate voice for females across sports. To achieve this, the tone of the campaign needed to resonate and become accessible and relatable to all women, from athlete to amateur. Through playing on outdated clichés and stereotypes, Salomon tackled the breaking down of stereotypes head on, and in the best way they knew how...playful, bold and strong. The result was an engaged, growing community of passionate and like-minded individuals - brought together across Salomon’s social channels, with the common goal to make outdoor sports a more inclusive space for women everywhere.
The ‘My Kind Of’ campaign was an opportunity to garner conversation in our community. We see post after post about good hair days, beauty regimes and nights’ out but what do the world’s most popular hashtags look like for the Salomon WMN? A hairstyle after a paragliding session, or getting geared up for a day out riding – these are the ‘must have looks’ for our community.
The stage was set for our Salomon WMN to get involved; the next step was to map how the idea played out across our channels, how to engage our female audience, and create longevity for the campaign. . ‘My Kind Of’ was born as the comms vehicle – our role was to play this out on Social; specifically Instagram, with crossposts on Facebook and Twitter, which were further bolstered by reposts by Salomon’s community of athletes and ambassadors.
Our strategy looked to take over our channels, so that the female voice was represented front and centre – there was no holding back. For one month, from May – June 2020, our feed became all about the campaign. We engaged our female ambassadors and athletes to create content around ‘My Kind Of’, showing us their lives and what it means to be a Salomon WMN.
Now we needed to get our audience involved. We wanted to see their ‘Kind Of’, this wasn’t just about the athletes, this was about every woman in our community. So, we created a contest. All our community needed to do was submit a picture or video that summed up what it meant to them to be a Salomon WMN, through the lens of ‘My Kind Of’. What was their morning routine? What did the weekend look like for them? How did they see themselves in the outdoors?
And the prize? Our very own ‘Salomon Beauty Box’. We’ve all seen beauty bloggers opening up boxes of goodies – but ours had a twist. They were packed full of things for our community to use whilst out on their adventures. Balm, sun cream, even a pair of hiking shoes from the new range. This was stuff they’d really want.
Our audience immediately rose to the challenge. We gave them an opportunity to express themselves and show why they love what they do in the outdoors. We received over 4,000 entries over the course of the month.
Not only this, but we saw a +18pp uplift in the share of female engagements on Facebook compared to the previous quarter.
And, the campaign saw a 55% hike in new female followers QoQ.
Not only did our community engage with our contest, but it’s helped to elevate the female voice in our community, and is another step towards a more diverse audience for Salomon.