Everyday Athletes Have Extraordinary Impact For Dove Men+Care

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

Earlier this month, we highlighted how Beyond Meat partnered with NBA players to help facilitate the company’s rapid growth. In particular, Beyond Meat focused on working with players that would communicate about their experiences organically consuming its plant-based products rather than solely focusing on the most well-known athletes.

Dove Men+Care is seemingly taking the exact opposite approach in its most recent campaign by featuring “everyday” athletes that share names with famous professionals including Chris Paul, Sean Williams, and Alvin Suarez. In particular, Dove is using name recognition to drive interest whether or not the famous athlete actually uses the products.

A deeper analysis of the Beyond Meat and Dove approaches, however, show that both companies appear to share the same strategy even if they are using different tactics. More specifically, each campaign is redefining the traditional use of athletes as influencers to better engage with their consumers in ways that drive tangible impacts for their businesses.  

That seems counterintuitive given that Dove features evidence showing that “seven in 10 men feel as though the everyday athlete isn’t represented in media – as elite professional athletes are usually the ones who push products” when talking about its latest campaign. In addition, using everyday people has been staple of Dove’s recent marketing campaigns for women’s products for a significant period of time.  

Why does Dove take this approach? Associate professor of sport and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina states “everyday consumers rather than celebrities…better connect with average customers.” So then why is Dove Men+Care focusing on everyday people with the same names as famous athletes?

We have used B6A’s Influencer Analysis Platform (IAP) within our Partnership Scoreboard to analyze multiple athletes as influencers. Professional athletes are particularly well-suited to drive lifts in brand engagement and awareness for new products and companies in ways that that more effectively enable them to reach their target audiences. In particular, athletes can generate valuable earned media conversation that derives from content coming from their owned accounts in ways that companies often cannot obtain through other channels for campaign launches.

However, these effects are typically only sustained when athletes create organic content. More specifically, continued authentic engagement with athletes as influencers derives from actual product usage or featuring products in an organic setting. Therefore, Dove is potentially obtaining the best of both worlds. The company generates the initial lifts in brand awareness from using the name of famous athletes while then obtaining ongoing benefits of connecting everyday athletes with everyday consumers.     

This thinking actually appears to one of the key reasons why Beyond Meat’s initial athlete partnership strategy focused on building a relationship with New Orleans Pelicans guard J.J. Reddick. “Famous” athletes drive initial interest but are the most effective when they turn into “everyday consumers.” That was the key to Reddick influencing other athletes and potential consumers to learn more about Beyond Meat’s products.

Using athletes as influencers will continue to be an important consideration for companies as part of their overall sponsorship and marketing strategy. Both Beyond Meat and Dove are working athletes on different ends of the competitive spectrum (professional and everyday) to achieve similar goals. More specifically, they demonstrate why finding the right influencers that will organically use the product is often more critical than working with the influencers with the largest audience.