When Brett O’Brien joined Foot Locker as a chief marketing officer last October, the brand had been a bit quiet.
The company had just been acquired by DICK’S Sporting Goods for $2.4 billion on the heels of bankruptcy and store closures in the years before. O’Brien’s mission has been to help bring the brand’s story to life and to get a younger demographic to understand what Foot Locker stands for and its importance within the sneaker culture.
“It’s important for us to get into that conversation within sneaker culture,” says O’Brien. “What was important for us was to start this journey of ‘It always will be Foot Locker’ and to really start to be declarative.”
Foot Locker just kicked off a new campaign centered on this idea of “It Always Will Be Foot Locker.” The new effort features a spot that is both a nostalgic celebration of the brand’s history in sports and music, as well as a look forward to what’s next. Think Moses Malone in white and red Air Force 1 Nikes in the NBA playoffs. Andre Agassi in green and white Stan Smiths at the U.S. Open. Run DMC in adidas Superstars on the streets of Queens. NBA star Larry Johnson dressed as Grandmama on Family Matters wearing black Converse Aero Jams. All the way through to an unreleased pair of Caitlin Clark Nikes.
“When you think about the history of sneaker culture into the future of sneaker culture, we have to play a role in all of that,” said O’Brien.
Brand Innovators caught up with O’Brien in New York to discuss the new campaign, where the retailer is going and what he learned during more than two decades at PepsiCo. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the strategy behind this campaign and why now?
This campaign is the most declarative, ‘Let’s enjoy Foot Locker for what Foot Locker is,’ but ‘Let’s remind people of what Foot Locker is.’ We’re not a house of brands. We’re not a bunch of brands that are coming together that we’re talking about on a consistent basis. We’re talking about Foot Locker. So, what does that mean? When you think about the history of sneaker culture into the future of sneaker culture, we have to play a role in all of that.
Which is why you saw a bit of back in the day, some of those nostalgic…and then the spot ends with a Caitlyn Clark shoe, which hasn’t launched yet. That’s that journey of sneaker culture and that emotional connection we have to sneakers. People get emotional when they talk about their first sneakers. It means something. And Foot Locker is at the epicenter of that, which is incredibly important to us. We haven’t really had a lot of dialog with our consumers in a while. We’ve been a little bit quiet. The idea was, let’s go out there and talk about it again and let’s get excited around Foot Locker.
Foot Locker is amazing. Awareness is incredibly high. If you were to stop anybody in the street and say, do you know what Foot Locker is? They would say, I know what Foot Locker is. But it’s not a shoe store. We don’t sell sneakers. It’s a place where people go and they feel something different. And that’s really special to us. We hear it over and over and over again. How do you bring it to life? How do you talk about that on the screen? And that’s hard. But that was the idea here and the reason for what we’re about to launch.
How did you decide which brands to feature in the new ad?
A lot of it came down to the brands that really meant something through the years, that had real impact. When you saw it, you thought, ‘Oh, grandma, I forgot all about that.’ Or the Iversons, that was totally breakthrough at the time. And of course, Jordan’s is a no-brainer. But it was really about those connections that meant something to culture, not just about sneakers or footwear innovation. The Agassi that we featured, the Stan Smith that we featured, the Moses Moment, all of those had a moment that meant something to culture and it wasn’t about the sport they were part of. It was about the mentality of when I wear this, I’m going to think something differently about myself and walk a little bit taller.
Why is it important for the brand to show up in culture?
It’s incredibly important for a brand to show up in culture because otherwise, culture is going to move on and your brand will be left behind. And so, how do you continually make sure that you’re doing the right things to not insert yourself in culture, but have culture be an important part of what you’re recognizing and what you’re helping move forward? For sneaker culture, a lot of it comes down to, are we giving the consumer the right experience? Are we giving them the right options? So, there’s a merchandising and a merchant type of proposition.
The Stripers are the No. 1 priority for Foot Locker. It’s the heartbeat of everything we do. They are the ones who educate themselves on, do you know why this color is this color? It’s not about, let us catch up to where people are. It’s how do we continue to have the right dialog so people feel like this just helped me become smarter, cooler and that you guys really know what’s up. That’s really important to us. Sneaker culture is evolving so much. How do we continually make sure that we’re doing the right things to push that evolution, but also be a part of that centralization of entertainment and fashion and art and sports collectively. This is an amazing opportunity to say Foot Locker lives in the middle of that. And that’s what we want to bring to life.
You mentioned your sales associates, the Stripers. Can you talk about the importance of this role and how you learn from them?
If you were to walk into any Foot Locker and ask a Striper why they are working at Foot Locker, they would say, ‘Well, I spend all my time here anyway. I may as well work here. I get to be around sneakers all day.’ It’s a love for what we do, not because it’s a job. ‘I know what sneakers mean and I’m excited by new launches. This is truly who I am.’ They start to tell you the stories of how it was on their corner when they grew up and ‘I used to go here. And now this is where my friends and family come.’ That’s what we hear over and over: ‘This was my community Foot Locker that I grew up in. I want to represent Foot Locker. Those Stripes mean something. They’re not just a cool uniform. They’re literally the authority on sneakers.’ The amount of knowledge that that crew has, I literally can’t spend enough time with them.
Why did you decide to work with Method Man in the ad?
We wanted somebody that had authenticity, but also knew sneaker culture. Wu-Tang Clan has had so many ways that they’ve inserted themselves in that regard. And New York is the epicenter of everything we do and where we get so much of our cultural cues so we wanted some of that New York love. I keep using the word authenticity, but there is no one more authentic to New York, to sneaker culture. We talked to him and said, would you be interested in doing this? And he said,’ I love Foot Locker. I spend so much time at Foot Locker. I’d love to talk about it.’
How do you make sure that the Foot Locker voice is present among all of the brands?
The beauty is we can talk directly to an audience that’s yearning for sneaker information and sneaker content and certainly nostalgia, which is a really interesting buzzword, but actually legit right now. People are going back and saying, ‘What did a Foot Locker used to look like? What were those sneakers? Where did they start? How did this become interesting to me?’ We have an opportunity to make sure that we’re talking to the right consumer. Consumers who care about us, who are leaning in already with sneakers. We can break through because we’ve got an audience that’s yearning for that information and that content.
It’s not singular brand content. It’s not trying to break through with, ‘Here is a new sneaker you need to know about,’ and thus driving traffic and consideration. This is a very different approach. We want to remind you of how amazing Foot Locker has been and always will be. It’s emotional. It’s got shareability. It’s emotional content versus, ‘Hey, let me go buy this because you’re telling me it’s cool.
Can you talk about the timing? Is this a back-to-school play?
Certainly, back-to-school right now is a big time for people to be thinking about what’s going to go on their feed and how they want to present themselves after summer.
Tell me what you learned from your 25 years at Pepsi and how you’re applying that here.
One of the things I learned was about branding and the importance of having consumers identify what it is that you mean as a brand and why they should care. You’ll notice there’s multiple brands in the spot, but Foot Locker is the overarching reason why they all came together. As a retailer, it’s really important to lean in with your partners and to make sure you’ve got that right message through your partnerships and their launches and the things that are important to them. But you have to make sure that your identity is absolutely paramount to everything else. That’s where this is much more of a declarative, ‘Hey, we’re Foot Locker and this is what we represent.’
We’re not just a place to go get X, Y and Z brands. This is a place to go and get everything I could ever want because this is the place that’s going to make me feel really great about myself and my immersion in the sneaker culture. What does Foot Locker mean? What is its importance to consumers? And then how do we hold that up at its highest as opposed to consistently just representing what our brands need? Because Foot Locker becomes like this hub, this place that people want to be.
