Principle of Marketing Communication - Armour

Running head: PRINCIPLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION
Principle of Marketing Communication
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PRINCIPLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION1
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.........................................................................................................................1
2. Discussion..............................................................................................................................1
2.1. Analysis of the Campaign...............................................................................................1
2.1.1. Analysis of the communication issues present in the campaign...............................2
2.1.2. Marketing communication campaign (Marketing communication theory)..............3
2.1.3. Meaning of the campaign.........................................................................................4
2.1.4. Evaluation.................................................................................................................6
3. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................8
4. References:..........................................................................................................................9
Summary..................................................................................................................................11

PRINCIPLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION2
1. Introduction
Most of the customers have considered Under Armour, one of the biggest American
brands to manufacture sportswear, casual apparel and footwear, as a brand that is built for
men until 2014. Despite this, Under Armour has been astonishingly successful and ranked in
2.3 billion dollars in sales in the year 2013 (James and Whitney 2018). However, the product
line exclusive for women was only accounted for 500 million dollars. For addressing this
issue, the company launched a Total Market campaign for targeting women under the title “I
Will What I Want”. This was done as the company wanted to change the view-points of the
people about it that it is a masculine brand and at the same time, drive their sales and
consideration, particularly among the women. This campaign had featured many of the
female well-known athletes belonging from different cultural backgrounds and let them speak
of the problems and hurdles that they had overcame for reaching the success they achieved.
This paper shall elaborate on presenting an analysis of chosen campaign for Under
Armour- “I will what I want”. It was launched in the year 2015 for solving a critical business
issue- “How does a brand long associated with American football win over a massive new
target that outright rejects the brand?” The main focus of this paper is to assess how the
company have achieved an astonishing 28 per cent of increase in its sales through this
campaign and how this have impacted on the perception of people about the brand.
2. Discussion
2.1. Analysis of the Campaign

PRINCIPLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION3
2.1.1. Analysis of the communication issues present in the
campaign
Under Armour brand is precisely about the athletics. The commercial “I Will What I
Want” of the company has featured the famous ballet dancer Misty Copeland. In this
campaign, one can hear a young voiceover to read the snippets from the ballet academy
letters to reject Misty Copeland as an adolescent student for the reason that she is lacking in
correct body to become a ballerina. The first spot of the campaign opened with a voiceover
from rejection letter- “You have the wrong body for ballet”- when the camera panned over
Copeland was warming up her muscles and performed on the stage (Youtube.com 2020). It is
claimed that Copeland lacks in accurate feet, has wrong body type, Achilles tendons and
torso length. It can be claimed to be a super juxtaposition of muscular strength and grace that
people had not seen ever before in the world of advertising. The campaign shows Misty
Copeland as a woman of colour who is successful as a prima ballerina with tagline “I will
what I want”. With the same, in this case, the product line of Under Armour was not
referenced by the participant “workout clothes, shoes and gear for women”, as per the
website of the company. This might be due to the reason that Misty Copeland advertisement
did not advertise such type of workout clothes, gear or shoes for the women. Instead, it is
focused on embodying for ballerina.
It is to mention that the traditional ballerina princess were pink-aisle fantasy that was
marketed for the little girls for years as the epitome of feminine form (Windels 2017).
However, in the Under Armour campaign, it is possible to read the black body of Misty
Copeland that was initially positioned as wrong kind of boy for ballerina. According to
Ortega (2014), visual analogies are open-ended in the ways in which the syntax of the verbal
analogies are not, and at the same time, the ambiguity of the direction in the visual analogy is
what makes them quite valuable in the creative departments of advertising. This campaign