Marketing boosts the Olympics.
In athlete parades, at every event venue and at every media opportunity, competitors often wear the branded apparel of their national sponsors. Unless, of course, the athlete is a star with a different brand deal.
For example, Nike is the apparel brand sponsor of the U.S. delegation, while men’s basketball star Stephen Curry has a partnership with Under Armor. Therefore, Stephen did not wear a Nike-branded jersey on the court.
Sponsoring Olympic athletes is a competitive sport in itself and involves huge sums of money.
But what about the unsponsored athletes who earn a spot and could become the next Simone Biles, Trinity Rodman or Katie Ledecky?
A small sportswear brand came up with a brilliant solution that also made it famous around the world.
We asked Robert Rose, chief strategist at CMI, to tell the story and its implications for marketers. Continue reading or watch this video:
Bandit plays unsponsored games
Olympic sponsorship totals are difficult to find. sports reporting Team USA alone has set a corporate sponsorship goal of $2.5 billion for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It’s a complex investment strategy for brands to determine which teams, individuals and sports to generate the most revenue from sponsoring.
But in the face of this high-stakes competition, one small brand has come up with a unique initiative.
Bandit, a small running apparel brand, conducted No sponsored projects. This is a great example of how marketing can solve real problems and provide tremendous value to everyone involved.
This is the problem Bandit solves. Many sports hold qualifying tournaments to see who can earn a spot on the Olympic team. For example, USA Track and Field hosts the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships.
At the trials, celebrities and past Olympians wear gear from big-name sponsors. But unsponsored contestants face a tough choice. They get free advertising for big brands by wearing their clothes, which could weaken their power in negotiating brand deals if they join the team. Or they could wear clothing without the logo and perhaps go unnoticed.
Bandit was too small to sponsor big-name stars or bet on any one athlete, but it saw an opportunity. It supports 35 unsponsored athletes competing in track and field trials and offers the same line of black, no-logo apparel available only to athletes. It also provides athletes with airfare, hotel and meal expenses during the trials.
This is the most critical. Bandit’s sponsorship agreement includes an opt-out clause that allows athletes to withdraw from the agreement at any time. So if they form this team, they can negotiate brand deals with anyone they want.
Why did the robber do this? To get an idea of what we’re doing right now—talk about running apparel brands.
The event was a huge success. bandit Measure media coverage, brand awareness, impressions Across various media. The CEO said they were sure they would see revenue benefits, but the level of awareness the company created was genius.
What’s amazing is that this brand There is existence in Paris. We contacted the organization after its sponsor in the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines withdrew. Now Bandit is taking to the Olympic stage.
Play new games and beat competing brands
So, what’s your takeaway?
If you are a smaller brand or a challenger brand, you may not be able to outperform or outperform your competitors. Gaining brand recognition is difficult.
But you can go deeper, be more trustworthy, be more valuable, be more innovative, be more fair Be better than your competition. You can play different games.
Bandit discovered a way to get into the big leagues—spreading marketing investments among numerous minor leagues. Those Bandit-sponsored athletes will always remember how the company solved their problems.
What’s more, everyone who wants to know who did this, who solved this problem will discover this brand. Bandit solves a bigger or different problem than you typically associate with a brand like yours.
In the early 2000s, I was the CMO of a small software company. No one knew what software as a service or cloud computing meant, and our product was all about online content management.
We compete with companies a thousand times our size, such as Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and Adobe. We are not trying to compete head-on and sell our online content management products better than those of the giants.
We sold better software-as-a-service ideas. We tell the story of cloud computing. This is what sets us apart. If we can sell that to people, then we’ll convince them that we can handle a small portion of their cloud computing. We don’t play product versus product. We played the new ideas game and built trust based on that.
So, the lessons you can learn from this and how robbers stole the attention From your biggest Olympic rival? Instead of making an existing game better, invent a new one.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
