Reebok #BeMoreHuman Links Fitness To Mental Wellbeing & Social Interaction

The end of January saw the launch of Reebok’s major new ‘Be More Human’ integrated global initiative that celebrates ordinary people’s ‘quest for both physical and personal fulfilment and to serve the greater good’.

It aims to connect the benefits of physical and fitness-led commitment to social interaction, mental wellbeing and perhaps even ethics.

The campaign is an everyman call to action that aims to cut through all the sports marketing clutter by adding an extra dimension to the usual ‘perform better’ campaigns with an emotional human element (stretching from being ‘better parents’ and ‘better leaders’ as well as being ‘better athletes’).

The launch campaign is fronted by a TV spot called ‘Freak Show’ which revolves around super committed people waking up in the early hours to push themselves to the physical and emotional limit (and through Reebok’s muddy Spartan Race competition)

‘We do it to be better. Period,’ says the voiceover on the ad which debuted around the Super Bowl.

Working with agency Venables Bell & Partners and director AG Rojas, the Reebok spot is about both striving and sacrificing in the mud and the rain and about families and fire-fighters.

‘By adopting such a lifestyle, you find yourself in a community of people joined together by a common purpose—to be better versions of themselves,’ says Reebok brand president Matt O’Toole.

‘We’re confident that when we push ourselves, we not only transform our bodies, we transform our entire lives.’

The ‘Freak Show’ is simply the start of a n initiative that includes multiple strands that stretch from clips designed to inspire such as ‘Dig’,

‘Honor’,

and ‘Play’,

to a ‘Human Score’ video that ambitiously tries to work as a test to distil our ‘humanness’ into a numeric value.

Consumers who sign up to participate each receive a percentage score from 1-100 on their own human value.

(Yes, really!)

These are paired with a ‘Be More Human Online Experience’ – a utility-led multi-channel platform jammed full of tools, information and activities.

The campaign is deemed such a major initiative for the brand that its logo has been transformed into a three-sided delta that reflects the ‘physical’, ‘mental’ and ‘social’ change that can be achieved via committed healthy living.

The campaign also sees Reebok challenge consumers to post their own post-workout photos with #nofilter.

Comment

There are echoes of Nike’s London 2012 Olympics ‘Find Your Greatness’ campaign –

although three years on it is more comprehensive and the tools are more sophisticated.

Of course, whether sufficient numbers of consumers actually use these tools to find ‘growth’ and ‘enlightenment’ remains to be seen.

Furthermore, one wonders whether it is genuinely any brand’s responsibility or role to numerically gauge our humanity.

Ambitious or overblown?

You decide!

Links

Reebok Be More Human

http://fitness.reebok.co.uk/be-more-human/#/home

Reebok YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/user/reebok

Reebok Twitter

https://twitter.com/reebok

#BeMoreHuman

@Reebok

Reebok Google+

https://plus.google.com/+Reebok/posts