Inside Salomon’s Quiet Invitation to Go Back Outside
Despite the pristine Salomon footwear you’ll see on the feet of fashionistas from Paris to Tokyo and San Francisco, the brand was born on the mountainside. The French-born company now calls itself a ‘modern mountain sports lifestyle brand’, but started out making metal ski edges that screwed onto wood skis, going on to innovate the first releasable ski bindings and the monocoque ski.
These days Salomon has a broader offering, catering to skiers, snowboarders, hikers, trail runners and people who want to walk around city centres looking like they could do all of those things at the drop of a fleece-lined mountaineering beanie – if they so wished.
Partnering with creative advertising agency DDB Paris, earlier this month Salomon unveiled its new multi-channel brand campaign — 'Welcome Back to Earth' – to expand global awareness among consumers and connect with younger audiences in key brand epicentres of San Francisco, Shanghai, New York and Paris, the campaign invites new audiences – as well as Salomon brand loyalists – to reconnect with the outdoors.
To find out the strategy and details of what went into this campaign, LBB’s Alex Reeves asked Salomon global chief brand officer Scott Mellin, DDB Paris chief creative officer Alexander Kalchev and veteran advertising director Martin de Thurah.
LBB> This feels like a departure for the sportswear category. How did you get there?
Scott> I've had a long career in the sports world, both on the product development side, on the advertising side and on the brand side. And the formula is pretty repeatable. If you look across ski brands, running brands, outdoor brands, athletic brands, it's all about winning, achievement. And honestly I didn't want to make another action sports campaign because it's just so predictable.
What we set out to accomplish was conveying an invitation to humanity that we want them to join us in the mountains, in a better place, where mental and physical wellness is valued, where any kind of athlete is valued. And that's why the campaign extends into all these different dimensions. We go from Lee [the hero of the piece] becoming a trail runner to becoming a hiker to a different set of characters from a more core and authentic point of view, touching the hiking space, touching skiing, snowboarding, trail running.
Alexander> The film is quite unique within the outdoor and sportswear categories. It’s not about performance, not about tech or equipment. It shows the pure feeling about reconnecting with nature and coming “home” to our own planet.
LBB> I’m interested that the campaign leans into Salomon’s roots as a brand born on the mountain, rather than leaning into the ‘gorpcore’ direction that has taken outerwear into the inner cities and made it fashionable. How did you engage with that decision?
Scott> Yeah, it's quite interesting. What I like about the authentic point of view we have in the sportstyle space is you can literally put a pair of their shoes on and go run the UTMB [Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc - an ultramarathon in the Alps] tomorrow. They were our fastest shoes 10 years ago, but they're still pretty fast. We weren't making fashion footwear for the sake of making fashion footwear. We were adopted by kids in Paris. [Streetwear boutique] the Broken Arm came to us and said, "have you seen what's going on in Paris with your old running styles?" And then it just became a business unit authentically.
This brand has such a complex set of customers and product categories. We came from making metal ski edges in the ‘40s to screw onto your wood skis, to developing the first releasable ski bindings, making the first rear-entry ski boot, the monocoque ski. Along that journey of skiing and snowboarding, we created seven Olympic sports, which most people don't realise. So, Salomon is a really interesting brand that has been at the forefront of innovation, both in terms of shaping sport culture and shaping sport technologies.
Then the leap forward to the current state. 80% of our turnover globally is footwear. We're kind of known as a ski brand but we're actually the dominant trail running and hiking footwear brand. And that gave us a much bigger appeal to a broader set of consumers.
That's where the campaign focus really comes in. This is really through the footwear lens, the appeal and approachability of footwear versus skiing. Just take the US as example - we have unaided awareness at 1%, which is actually roughly equivalent to the number of skiers in America. If you use that calculus, people know Salomon as a ski brand or snowboard brand, and they don't really know us as a footwear brand. So my big KPI here as the global chief brand officer is to drive our global awareness. I believe we can best do that through film.
LBB> How did DDB Paris work collaboratively with the Salomon team on this content?
Scott> Partnering with Alex and Xavier [Mendiola, account director] at DDB Paris was pretty fun. When I came into the business there was already an existing platform for the brand campaigns which was trying to mash all of the brands, sports and product into one piece. And it didn't feel like there was any room for the consumer in that. We were doing a really good job of describing everything we did, but nothing. And when I sat down with those guys, I said we need something super anthemic, emotional. We're going to invest in a creative ecosystem that allows the work to breathe and allows the consumer to feel a part of it versus punching people in the face with some action sports footage. It was a process to get to the kind of work that I had in my head, but they were great partners in interpreting what we wanted to build and what we thought was right for the brand.
Alexander> Salomon’s brief was clear from the start: produce a powerful brand story to share Salomon’s mission, with a human truth and clear call to action: let’s invite everyone back to nature. Because that is what humans need right now. Once the ‘Welcome back to Earth’ idea was approved, DDB and Salomon worked in close collaboration to choose the perfect cast and decide what a universal representation of outdoor sports should look like, without falling into the cliches of performance and mountain sports imagery.
LBB> What is your creative process, what led you to this idea?
Alexander> We wanted the film to make people actually feel something, this urge to go back into nature. Something very simple, clear and universal. But at the same time we had to translate this truth into a striking visual. That’s where the “Welcome back to Earth” message came from. It was a very visual way to express this idea of human alienation from nature. We are almost like astronauts living apart from our own planet for years. We wrote a film that showed this journey back towards Earth, but not literally, but rather in a psychological, almost spiritual way.
The film has three acts and the last act - the “arrival” back into nature had to feel as natural and pure as possible, without trying too hard to elevate it.
Scott> I grew up in the mountains in Colorado. I raised my kids in the mountains of Colorado. My wife and I are lifelong skiers and Nordic skiers and I'm a backcountry skier and an alpinist. And what I love about my life in the mountains is a couple of dimensions. One is physical and mental wellness. Feeling good about yourself means you're gonna feel great about life. There's a sense of accomplishment that comes from the mountains, whether it's a low angle hike or summiting Denali. There's an amazing sense of independence that comes out of time in the mountains, but there's also a sense of community that comes through. In climbing or ski mountaineering you have to be with a partner. As a brand we want to share that with people. We're trying to kind of de-intimidate the mountains and I think this more approachable tone will resonate with consumers. It's not scary. And what it delivers back to you is really amazing.
LBB> Martin, what were your first thoughts when you saw the script on how you'd approach this?
Martin> I thought oh, this could be a really ambitious project and a very difficult one. It was like a poem, but not yet written. I knew it would be difficult to find some meaningful language, especially the middle part. Losing your ego, reconnecting. I knew at this stage it would have to be a highly experimental process, we would need a big wrench to wrestle this idea.
LBB> With one lead protagonist, casting must have been crucial. What were you looking for?
Martin> For me we were looking for vulnerability and curiosity in a young woman. And honesty.
Scott> We have an objective to approach a younger consumer and a more female gender mix as a brand. And so rather than making a female campaign, we chose the process of inserting the female voice genuinely into the brand narrative. And so, this lovely woman Lee, who's the centrepiece of the brand films. She’s actually a Chinese national and an up-and-coming actress in London. Martin found her through a casting call and she just has that kind of emotional quality that's, I think, very understandable, relevant, recognisable. Particularly when you think about Salomon's epicentres of Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo. That look is just so understandable and the emotional qualities of her are resonating with the consumer. The feedback that we're getting on the piece is super strong.
LBB> What were the biggest keys that really helped you to unlock the way to this work?
Scott> The reason I came to Salomon is I felt like it was the right combination of leadership, CEO, brand and ownership. Particularly at this point in my career, when you can align all of those things, it's pretty easy to see that you can do the best work of your life. That was the attraction to Salomon. Internally, we had no friction. I was really clear on what my vision was. We were really clear with our partners on how to execute. We got to the narrative quite quickly.
I've been in front of and behind a lot of creative. We built a prototype. I was able to socialise the prototype up and down the organisation, bring people along in the creative journey, so that there are no surprises. And I think that's one big takeaway. Bring the people in your company along on the creative journey. Then everybody's a part of it and you synchronise all of the touchpoints, from distribution to your retail partners to your stores to the choice of product, which was very direct and very informed. That's the product that is featured on our website today. It wasn't like we're just winging it.
It was a function of a lot of sharing, a lot of internal meetings and making sure that people understood what we were going to build because I wanted everybody to feel a part of it. When you see your brand that you've worked for on television, or your mom sees it, it's super powerful.
What I'm really happy about too is that this really is global work. If you think about Salomon trading in 100 countries, it's why there's no voice over. We can do it all through cinematography, through edit and music. I think the power of the work is that it's instantly understandable whether you're in China or Japan or Vietnam, or Chicago or Paris or Des Moines, Iowa.
LBB> Your regional media buy on the Super Bowl definitely helped with that exposure in the US!
Scott> Yeah, we bought the New York and San Francisco DMAs, which are two of our target communities. And then we'll have a bunch of work broadcast starting in March in the UK across EMEA, on a variety of different channels.
LBB> Is there anything that might surprise us about the film?
Alexander> The film uses very little VFX and is mostly created in-camera. We wanted to create a visual language that would go beyond sports and be able to touch people on a deeper level. To that end, even the VFX had to feel organic and human and we gave Martin de Thurah a lot of space to experiment with real life practical effects, to experiment with during editing.
LBB> What was the most important thing to get right during the shoot?
Martin> For me and Kasper Tuxen the DP, it was about trying to find something new in how we would film. We tried with the means we had. The most important thing to get right were the little cracks which could open the material. This could easily go wrong and we needed the tone to not feel superficial.
LBB> What were the biggest challenges?
Scott> I think that the biggest hurdles were self-inflicted. Like you get into the edit process and you're like, "Ah man, can we beat that shot?" or like "Is that sound, is that one little moment perfect? Like the water in the creek? Is that perfect?" We were definitely pixelfucking a lot.
I have so much respect for the team at DDB because they dealt with my creative direction and all of our pixelfucking, frame by frame. But that's the passion that you put into these kinds of projects. You want it to be perfect for the brand because the product is so good, our advertising should have the same qualities as our product. That's just honouring what we do as a company in a respectful way.
LBB> What are you most proud of about the finished campaign?
Scott> We actually built eight films. There's a couple that have alternative endings that we haven't fully put into the flighting of the rotation yet, but I want to test a couple of these alt endings which totally change the meaning of the piece. I'm excited to see how the consumer responds to some of those alt endings. The craft of this type of storytelling can create totally different emotions just with two or three frames at the end of the piece. We still continue to nuance the work a little bit.
I think the thing that I'm most proud of is the emotional qualities of the piece. You feel something and that's what I wanted people to come away with. Whether you're seeing a 15-, 30-, 60-, or 90-second cut, they all have this powerful emotive quality that we hope moves tens of millions of people into our brand,
I want Salomon to be recognised as the brand that invited people into the mountains, into hiking, into running, into trail running and skiing and snowboarding.
