Are You Ready for Some Football? Optimal’s Deep Dive on the Elite Athlete Perspective on Brands

Summary: (1) Optimal proprietarily collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative data on key attributes of brands from the perspective of elite athletes including pro, NCAA D1, elite high school, and retired athletes. Understanding the views of this unique and critical cohort on brand preferences and characteristics is key to discovering which brands are winning and losing, and why. (2) Elite athlete views also inform which brands may succeed (and how to do so) with athlete partnerships. In the attached 16-page presentation, we combined our proprietary measurement of elite athlete perspectives with a broader analysis to provide a comparison of brand positioning and inflections versus ”regular” shoppers. (3) The analysis allows us to isolate the variables behind incumbent share loss at NKE, UA and the drivers of share gains from Alo and Hoka, for example. (We wanted special edition colors for the work, so we came up with a color combo we liked). (4) Our firm commends summer intern Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng for his insights and contributions to this analysis.