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Heritage sports brands may be tempted to rely on their history to appeal to a new generation that wasn’t there to see it. But in the fast-moving digital attention economy, that’s a mistake, says Antonio Gnocchini, chief marketing officer at Diadora. He joins The Big Impression podcast to explain how the iconic Italian brand is reclaiming its spot in the performance market. By leaning into a challenger brand mindset during the Paris 2024 Olympics — without the price tag of official sponsorship — Gnocchini and his team are shifting the focus from nostalgia to high-performance innovation.   Episode Transcript Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio. Damian Fowler (00:00): I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today, we're looking at how a heritage sportswear brand carved out its own spotlight at the Paris 2024 Olympics without being an official sponsor. My guest is Antonio Gnocchini, Chief Marketing Officer at Diadora, the iconic Italian brand known for its made in Italy craftsmanship. In the lead of the Paris, Antonio and his team launched a global brand campaign built around Diadora's roster of Italian athletes from Trackstar, Larissa, Yapacino, defensers and speed skaters, all while showcasing innovations like the Atomo Running Shoe. That's the first high mileage running shoe made in Italy in three decades. We're going to break down how Diadora timed its campaign to maximize the Olympic moment, how it differentiates itself from giants like Nike and LVMH, and what this strategy says about building awareness in a crowded high-stakes marketing landscape. So let's get into it. (01:07): Antonio, can you tell us about why the Paris Olympics was such an important moment for Diadora as it sought to elevate its brand name again? Antonio Gnocchini (01:18): So if you are a multi-category sport brand, Olympics is certainly the big event, the main event, your main catwalk of the main show. And you prepare for it for a long time because you need to be in one of the most competitive environment with the best product, competitive athletes. Everything needs to be perfect. And it's also one of those moments in which you can go deeper with attention, with messages. If you are serious about sport and you want to communicate, sport brand values, what you really stand for, it's not easy, especially today in moments in which the attention is not much, few seconds from everybody. Channels are very fast and flattened messages very easily. The Olympics is a moment in which for a few weeks you have the attention. You have people connected and engaged. You have people who care. And so it's a perfect environment to talk again about what you stand for. (02:41): And so going back to the Olympics was a statement to say, we actually are a competitive sport brands, a performance brand, not only lifestyle of it. And so yeah, it was such an important environment for us. Also, these Olympics was maybe one of the first ones that I've seen since I started doing this job when you could see some challengers brands activating and being visible. (03:15): In the past, this was really an event only for main sponsors and official sponsors mostly. Now this is a moment of challengers. And if you find the right way and if you had a good connection with your outlets, you could be doing a successful marketing campaigns and actions. Damian Fowler (03:35): That's really interesting to hear you say that. And I think, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is the kind of media environment that we exist in now, does that make it possible for challenger brands to find a way to reach audiences that they otherwise might not be able to find back when it was the main TV channels and big glossy mags, there are more niches now in many ways. Antonio Gnocchini (04:00): There's a very interesting report that Business of Fashion and McKinsey release every year. And the most recent one was a study from McKinsey, which they were showing displaying how the sport market, which was dominated by only few incumbents. And you could see that at Olympics, still today, the most recent one, the usual suspects are dominated most of the sports. But in this past few years, there is a change going on in which incumbents are really under pressure from Challengers brand in the sport industry. They're gaining momentum. Challenges are gaining space, gaining market share, and also visibility. And you can say that maybe this is linked to the explosion of running as a global movement, but it's not only that. Running certainly as contributed, because running is one of those categories that is really extremely democratic. And yeah, sure, track and field main athletes, famous names help, but you can become a successful running brand without having only the most amazing hundred meters runners. (05:37): You can be successful by working in other ways. And you see brands starting to become more visible through running in the sport industry. Damian Fowler (05:47): What's interesting about Diadora is that it has this very significant legacy as a sports brand. I mean, I think back to my childhood when I used to absolutely love Beyond Borg. And as soon as I saw the name Diadora, I remember Borg. And of course there's other soccer legends like Roberto Baggio or Francesco Totti. But in recent years, it's been a little bit maybe eclipsed by bigger brands that you just mentioned. So you're a challenger brand, but you're also a legacy brand. Could you explain a bit more of the context around the history of the brand? Antonio Gnocchini (06:24): If you are passionate about sport, when you land at Diadora and you visit the museum, it is a kid in a candy store. That was my experience at the museum is you could see in real life the objects of desire of your youth. In my bedroom, I had posters of all these heroes and there's a moment, there's a scene in King Richard with Will Smith, in which you hear for a moment in the movie, you hear Venus and Serena Williams coach telling Richard Williams to wait on the Nike offer because the perfect offer for any tennis player at the time was the one Jennifer Capriati was getting from Diadora. When I watched the movie, I was like, whoa. So we wear really the tennis brand and the brand that was in relation with athletes, especially tennis athletes. We were the tennis athletes brand. What happened? (07:34): I think that the brand, the company really focused for few decades on product, product marketing, sports marketing contracts, traditional marketing actions. While in the meantime, other brands, other sport brands have become very sophisticated, very innovative in their marketing strategies, films where Nike's main language and they were exciting product of their marketing department. I think the brand here, the Theodo has been focusing on other things and lost the engagement with consumers globally. And then for a few years, as I was saying, the focus had been really on capitalizing on its legacy and becoming more of a lifestyle brand. But in reality, the market can tell you that if you're not serious about sport, you lose your credibility as a lifestyle of sport brand. Damian Fowler (08:42): Yeah. So the new campaign or the more recent campaign is about reasserting that sports connection. How else would you define the brand as it is now? Antonio Gnocchini (08:57): I think that what we needed to do ... So the first thing that I wanted to do is to prove that the sensation, the feeling that we had was correct. So we run a long and insightful brand health monitor study, and the results of that study was showing that, yes, that we were a legacy brand, people recognized the name, but they couldn't really link it any longer to specific performance product, and they were not buying performance product any longer from the Adora. So we were also associated linked to values like being Italian, but at the same time, it was this idea of romantic Italian, quaint, Italian, traditional. If you want to be successful in sports, you have to talk about innovation, you have to be recognized for your capacity of being a technological advanced company. And so the main effort for us in the beginning was to go back into making sure that our research and development center was up to speed and that the marketing department was capable of telling these type of stories because these stories were in fact very important for our consumer, for our focused consumers, the focus of our target, a younger consumer that wanted to talk about sport, they wanted to be capable also of discovering innovative brand sports. (10:44): So even if we were not one of the main incumbents by being authentic in sport, especially in running and in other categories, by being authentic, we could engage with this young consumers who was interested in discovering new brands that have an innovation angle that was really relevant. Damian Fowler (11:11): Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I'm interested to hear you talk a bit more about that audience group that you really wanted to reach and the profile of that group. And presumably there's an element of conquesting going on because you've got to get them from some of the bigger names that we've already talked about. Antonio Gnocchini (11:29): Yeah. As I was saying, running has become one of those category, goes beyond just track and field, goes beyond the daily jogger, goes beyond ... It is really something that touches wellness, fashion is playing into running a lot. Everybody is doing running collections today, not just the usual suspects. We wanted to make sure that in this environment in which you had a lot of noise, we could be recognized as authentic, as separate from the noise. So we wanted to talk with a niche and then make sure that that authentic young athlete was putting the mileage out. So it wasn't talking about running, but putting also the miles and the sweat in running