Asics’ multi-channel ‘She Breathes’ global campaign for its women’s Nagino Collection is deeply rooted in breath and highlights the importance of women taking control of their mental wellness.
The campaign sees the sportswear company set out to acknowledge the importance of women taking control over their mental health through exercise.
The work is informed by the insight that women typically carry a heavier mental load which leads to the fact that females are twice as likely as men to suffer from extreme stress. During those periods, where stress and worries take control, women can physically feel the weight bearing down and the marketing aims to address this.
Thus the campaign is creatively rooted in the breath. Contrasting shortness of breath and tightness in the chest during high stress moments, with the controlled, rhythmic breaths of a workout and then the deep release breath as a workout comes to an end and the protagonist is finally relaxed with a head of clear of thought.
The female-focused campaign, which was created by new agency WMN (the new female-led creative studio by Crispin Porter Bogusky London), features executions across multiple platforms working together to bring the main insight to life.
The campaign, which spanned video, print, multi-format OOH, social, web and PR work rolled out during April across Asia, Europe and the USA.
The marketing burst works together to bring the core insight to life and is spearheaded by a hero film that opens with a series of women emitting sighs and loud breaths in various stressful situations. These breaths then take on a different rhythm and feel as the spot transitions to showing the women exercising – running, playing tennis, practising yoga – as they find a sense of mental peace through physical activity.
The lead spot was backed by OOH executions in multiple formats and bespoke in-feed content, plus snackable social content filmed on the day and optimised for Instagram Reels and TikTok, as well as product focused paid carousels to drive conversion to the Nagino Collection website.
Titled ‘ASICS Women: NAGINO Collection’, the lead video dropped on 3 April and urged viewers to ‘catch a breath with the new Nagino Collection designed to enable her to achieve calm through mindful movement’.
As for the collection itself, according to Asics, each piece was specifically designed and crafted to inspire body confidence and enable women to move freely and undistracted.
The collection and the campaign was created in response to Asics ‘2022 State of Mind Index’: which demonstrated a positive link between movement and wellbeing and which also revealed that women exercise for 40 minutes less than men on average per week.
“We wanted to highlight that there’s a virtuous circle to be uncovered here,” explained WMN Founder and Chief Executive Helen James. “When you carve out time for yourself and exercise, when you breathe deeply and calmly, the weight of your seemingly endless To Do list lessens, and your stress levels fall.”
Asics EMEA EVP Gary Raucher added: “We know that stress and anxiety levels continue to rise, but we also know exercise can help. Yet our own research shows that women don’t exercise as much as men and that negatively impacts their State of Mind scores. We need to change that.”
The agency team was joined by Director Amy Becker Burnett and Photographer Wendy Huynh.
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WMN launched in March with the objective of shaking up the ways that brands communicate with women and this is its first global campaign for Asics.
It follows on from other recent Asics campaigns such as ‘Mind Games – The Experiment’ and ‘The Art Of Relay’, plus ‘Let Sport And Movement Uplift You’.
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