As the final project for a class in Sustainability in Marketing and Communications, we were tasked with creating a new marketing strategy for a brand to communicate its sustainability initiatives. My group chose Puma as our case study. We quickly learned that Puma is actually the most sustainable sportswear brand, but nobody knows about this. This was our challenge. How do we make people aware of Puma’s ongoing sustainability efforts and how do we integrate sustainability into their brand storytelling initiatives?

Through extensive market research, competitor analysis, and strategic communication segmentation, we realized that we needed to leverage sustainability as a secondary but compelling differentiator alongside performance and style. This is because the Puma consumer is not buying Puma products for their correlation to sustainability. They are buying Puma because of style and product performance. So, rather than disrupting this organic asset, we instead came up with a new strategy, which we called “Born in Nature, Forever Wild,” to position Puma as a functional performance brand with a sustainability edge. Take a closer look at our presentation and appendix to see how we utilized audience segmentation, competitor communications focus analysis, and the 4P’s marketing mix to develop our strategy.