Branding and the developments of recent times...

Recently we have been to a number of pitches in London, and while we unfortunately did not manage to get the job in question there were some up sides to visiting the big smoke. For us London is easier to get to that some of our clients within Wales so it makes sense for us to target businesses over the bridge. Watch this space on the job front.

Anyway to relieve some stress I thought some retail therapy would help. I had seen some puma trainers a few weeks ago and thought I would go back and take a second look (who am i kidding I went to buy), The trainers really struck me because as always it was the brand and its associates that had just clicked fro me recently:

With this in mind I thought I would describe puma through a personal experience.

During my school years I was fairly sporty. I was a member of the baseball team and also rock climbed about three times a week. I wasn't a massive football fan, I played at lunchtime but never went for the school team or anything like that. At this time football boots were starting to take off in terms of a mass product range. One of the more expensive and popular boots out was puma kings. I think some of the best English footballers at the time were wearing them so they had a 'cool' feel to them if you were into football. Fo me the brand seemed to be talking a different language to me and I was very much an adidas person as they were at the time venturing into rock climbing by sponsoring some of the best climbers of the time.

puma didn't really come into my thinking then for about another decade or so when I had (probably subconsciously) puma in my life again. puma had started to sponsor the boots for motor racing. Both F1 cars and motoGP. This began the change for me, before I had seem then almost mimicking adidas and nike, from here on I started to see them differently. The associations with DUCATI, FERRARI and also VOLVO through yachting had taken puma into a totally different space, at a similar time they brought Phillipe Stark in to create a number of shoes that further began the change into a design led company that had a degree of style and arrogance.

The seed was finally sewn when I went to a puma store with my good friend Ben, who raved about the interior of one of the puma stores. I went in and once again the feel and style was different from the other brands of the time. FRom here on in it was only a matter of time before I was going to buy something from puma. It was a few days after Usain Bolt had run to victory in both 100 and 200 metres during the world championship and I found myself in London near a puma store :-)