The Tanning of America (25 page)

Again, the baby boomer era and the
Mad Men
advertising attitudes still running the show didn't hold up the right mirror to the multicultural, multigenerational, polyethnic consumers that we can now call the millennials. By 2001 the millennials had become the most informed, most discerning consumers ever to appear on the planet. At this stage, factors going into purchasing consideration had also changed. No longer could a brand get away with doing the autocratic monologue to cram down their message. No longer could the language be verbalized as talking to the mass audience; the focus was now on individuals. No longer could slogans or jingles be force-fed because even though they might be catchy, they didn't necessarily entice you to buy the product.

We had arrived at that point in time when it was imperative for brands to issue an invitation. Consumers wanted to be allowed in, to have a point of view in the matter. Elements that needed to be emphasized were social, experiential, and then, finally, retail. In the old days, all advertising had to do was push retail. But now other considerations—the social-status entry point and the experiential/emotional entry point—had to be woven into the invitation. A very gentle relationship, I might add. What's more, with this choosier consumer, design aesthetics were influencing purchase consideration more than ever.

In a challenging retail environment, the payoff for a radical disruption strategy is never guaranteed. With a new product, brand, or organization being launched into a crowded marketplace, it may be easier to expect you'll attain the desired goal of gaining a certain amount of attention. But when it's a strategy for reviving a brand that has lost relevance and is on its last gasp, a radical disruption strategy is like applying the defibrillator paddles to a patient on life support. When your brand is not performing, risk and disruption are among your few assets. When you are performing, you are naturally risk-averse. Yeah, true disruption is a complete risk, loud, bold, multitiered, without guarantees, and extremely expensive. But for a dying brand, if you don't try it and you're dead, then it wasn't a risk, right?

We knew that Reebok lacked any credibility when it came to communicating with its target consumer. Whatever new, fresh values it was embracing wouldn't be perceived anyway and the chance to connect to passion points would be denied. We had to relieve the brand of the baggage it was shouldering and come correct, believable, with something new. The solution was to create what in some circles is called a brand extension but flies on its own as a new, alternative brand—not an offshoot or pretender to follow in Reebok's footsteps but a satellite brand that could chart its own course and direction.

Explaining this disruptive strategy to Paul Fireman, I had to remind him that anything we did couldn't overlap or in any way be seen as like Nike—which we all accepted had the monopoly on performance sneakers. “Paul,” I remember telling him early in our planning, “we aren't going to do anything to make people believe our sneakers are going to make them jump higher or run faster than they will in a pair of Nikes, so let's not even go down that path.” What kids did want were color options to match their apparel—brightly colored soles, for example, to coordinate other arhcles of clothing. That mattered more than performance.

He understood. Likewise when my team and I pointed out the futility of trying to remake Reebok without an alternative higher-end brand, he saw that made sense too. The model we used as an example for this new brand we wanted to create was what Toyota did when they wanted to veer into the luxury end of the auto market. Realizing that consumers couldn't wrap their heads around such a radical shift in how the Toyota brand represented itself, it created Lexus as a stand-alone brand to house their aspirational and luxury values. In no time, Lexus was a well-established top name brand in the higher-cost bracket. Most of the public didn't know the two were even related. But for auto experts, when Lexus was introduced it came ready with an outstanding automotive track record in its DNA. Later, when we saw the Toyota brand get killed almost overnight—once the raft of acceleration problems and recalls met their tipping point and hit the news—Lexus as a brand was pretty much spared. It didn't have to rebuild its good name the way that Toyota did.

Needless to say, getting the right name for a new satellite brand for Reebok wasn't going to be easy. We got lucky. As it turned out, the perfect name was on the tip of Paul Fireman's tongue. In 1985, when he took his company public, the stock symbol for traders had been denoted by the abbreviation RBK. Reebok without the vowels? It was current and sounded cool. I loved it.

We now had a brand name that embodied its roots in sports footwear and that reflected hip-hop culture's penchant for abbreviations. Taking it a step farther, the next goal was to link the athleticism of sports to a visual profile of hip-hop music and its icons. This presented a multitude of possibilities, as Paul Fireman had always sought, to develop the main theme. We dubbed the platform, “The Sound and Rhythm of Sports.” The underlying story premise came from a fact of life that I'd observed since childhood—rappers want to be athletes and athletes want to be rappers.

Little had changed in the long-standing affinity between hip-hop and most forms of athletic competition. So much code-sharing and switching had been taking place across the eighties and nineties—with the language and customs of hip-hop permeating the field of sports and vice versa—that the mentality was filtered in a two-way process. Brands, of course, had accelerated the distribution of the style and cool that was being cross-bred. The urban look, from the cuts of clothing to the cornrows and tattoos, was being adopted by a diverse mix of players as readily as they were importing/exporting the language being adapted by athletes. This was a tanning effect on the global level, turning the code into a conversation to be used by black, white, brown, yellow, red, whomever; it was also being shared with the growing numbers of foreign-born athletes learning to talk hip before knowing literal translations of words. The use of playing-field colloquialisms rarely prevented players (with college degrees or not) from being able to speak into microphones to millions of fans while addressing the finer points of the game without being a) inappropriate, or b) inauthentic.

Kobe and Shaq weren't the only ballers who took their shots as rappers.
Basketball's Best Kept Secret
, released in 1994, boasted the rhyming of nine NBA stars—including Jason Kidd and Gary Payton. Deion Sanders, the Florida State phenom who went on to play pro baseball and pro football, had a mid-nineties rap album with a single that got some spins, “Must Be the Money.” The French-born Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs would do very well in the later '00s with a hip-hop album performed in French.

Meanwhile, attempts to cross over from music into sports were not as common as were the number of ballers trying to rap. But it happened. There was Master P, for instance, the New Orleans artist/producer/entrepreneur whose hip-hop entertainment empire built in the 1990s once included a sports agency, No Limits Sports Management. They represented several professional players (including the Heisman Trophy winner and star running back Ricky Williams—who was drafted fifth overall by the New Orleans Saints and later went to the Miami Dolphins). While Master P had enough skills to earn serious tryouts himself with the Fort Wayne Fury (Continental Basketball Association) and the NBA's Charlotte Hornets, he never made it to regular-season play.

These particulars would give us fuel for “The Sound and Rhythm of Sports.” But the more we looked at the possibilities, the greater our consensus was that our most effective marketing was going to happen in product development. In other words, yeah, cool name, crazy ideas for
how
to sell, but first,
what
was RBK going to sell? We knew what we had set out as the brand's strategic intent and mandate: “to be relevant to global youth by creating innovative products and marketing that connects sports with the sharp edge of music, fashion and entertainment.” What we didn't know was the details.

Once again, we were lucky. Reebok already had the shoe series and the basketball star that had been waiting in the wings for RBK. Perfect. The original shoe in the series was undeniably cool. It was simple, with a super-appealing toe shape; they had made a limited number of them with a color wave framing the front part of the sneaker and had distributed lots by specific color in only certain cities. That way, if you were in L.A. you could have only red, or in Boston only blue, and so on. Paying attention to consumer cues, the line reflected the awareness that kids didn't want the soles of their sneakers to get dirty, so they too were made in colors that hid the grime—and for owners of multiple pairs they could be traded out to go with other colors they were wearing as far as hats and jackets. The rest of the design elements weren't fussy; the line was edgy by going against many of the bells and whistles of some of the signature sneakers everyone else was promoting. How fitting for Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers, who was edge and rebellion personified.

Iverson was considered by some to be the anti-Jordan. If that was the case, it wasn't the worst thing to be when there was no way RBK would win in a contest against the wholesome, safe face of Nike. But I would also argue that Iverson was following in the footsteps of what Michael Jordan had begun earlier by defying the status quo. With his nickname, “the Answer,” Iverson represented the underdog mentality of a guy who was barely six feet tall but who could still dunk and hit three-point buzzer beaters to win games while running circles around opponents. And he took the antiestablishment stance even further, not just with his cornrows and tats all over his body, but as the first NBA player to vocally refuse to wear short, fitted basketball shorts and get into trouble for going against the grain. At 180 pounds soaking wet, in his baggy shorts that looked two sizes too big, he could have been any kid from any urban neighborhood or someone you knew. And those kids who shared the same dream of making it to the NBA might not have made it but Iverson gave them hope that it was possible. After “the Answer” broke the ice, other players and fans alike began adopting cornrows, tattoos, and baggies, which were soon showing up on courts across America at every level. It was all part of hip-hop culture's embrace of individuality and the power of marching to your own beat.

For some brands, an unapologetic bad boy like Allen Iverson would not have been the right marketing fit. But for RBK, at that point in the brand history when it needed to come out into the market with a massive splash and have some rags-to-riches appeal, Allen Iverson was a way of putting a mirror up to a figure like Rocky Balboa. Whatever the obstacles, the message implied, they could be overcome—as long as you had some of that cool.

Plus, with Iverson and our mantra that all rappers want to be athletes and all athletes want to be rappers, we had another case in point. He, in fact, had recorded a single, “40 Bars,” and was working on an album. Neither would be released, mainly due to NBA commissioner David Stern's concerns about offensive language. Still, that didn't take away from Allen Iverson's credibility as a basketball star who conveyed the look and attitude of hip-hop—as well as the rhythm of the sport.

Now Reebok could get ready for the launch of the first Iverson sneaker to go forth under the RBK banner. All we needed was the sound, as I had promised Paul, that would make our efforts different from what everyone else had tried before. The goal was to find an unlikely voice to pair with Iverson. Because the airwaves had been so saturated by iconic sports celebrities repping brand-name goods, anything reminiscent of a monologue was not going to work. With a pairing, the linkage between sports and music—emphasizing the aspiration of rappers to be ballers and vice versa—could be given a visual profile. It would also be a kind of dialogue that consumers were being invited to join. When I recommended Jadakiss, an up-and-coming rapper from the group the Lox, at first the honest answer was that most of the men and women in the room had never heard of him. The only ones who knew—and who nodded—were all under twenty-five. Right on the money. Since we wanted to lace elements of newness through the campaign, Jadakiss fit the bill. He wasn't mainstream. He was a rap superstar. He also had big talent, a husky voice, humor, and fun. Jadakiss was our guy.

For the commercial we didn't have to rely on luck because we brought in the reigning superstar of hip-hop video direction, Hype Williams, and then he worked his magic. When we designed the commercial, I wanted to make sure that it had the feeling of a soundtrack. We decided that the rhythm of sports would be based on the squeaks from the sneakers, the hot new A5, and that Allen Iverson could dribble to the beat—and that Jadakiss could rap to it. The commercial was shot in black-and-white with splashes of color. Even before the reaction from the launch, we knew we had a winner on our hands. From that day forward, Paul Fireman always referred to RBK as his “music shoes.”

In keeping with radical disruption, we needed the RBK launch to be especially noisy to create a sense of urgency for purchase consideration. And loud it was. The spot officially debuted on Sunday, February 10, 2002, during the NBA All-Star Game, after a press release bombarded media outlets everywhere and anywhere promoting the commercial as a “cutting edge fusion between hoops and hip-hop.” On BET, Reebok products and references were being celebrated through placement and programming integration, starting with “RBK Freestyle Fridays” on one of the most popular shows,
106 and Park,
a video countdown.

Like I said, we knew the commercial was hot. But we couldn't have imagined its sound and rhythm would be so addictive and authentic that radio stations in NYC and Philly started putting it on the air as if it was the latest hip-hop single—a commercial! Those DJs had no issue with giving free play to an ad because they got the boost for discovering it. Listeners even called in requesting it. Before long, the commercial track ended up on mix tapes. Unbelievable.