Canadian Athletes’ Online Brands

January 21, 2013
 |  105 Comments

I’d like to take a look at three Canadian athletes’ brands over my next few blog posts and highlight what they do well and in addition look at what else they can do to captivate their audience and tell their story.

First things first, here’s who I chose to look at:

  1. Emily Batty (Mountain Bike Racing)
  2. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (Ice Dance, Figure Skating)
  3. Alexandre Despatie (Diving)

For the purpose of these blog posts, I’m going to discuss the following ‘brand’ qualities:

  • How they embody the brand (being the brand).
  • How they demonstrate their why (reason for existence) in the world.
  • Their uniqueness & my perspective (images, logo, colour, etc.)
  • How they’re making an impact/difference.

Emily Batty

emilybattyEmily Batty is a sweet, girly, fun-loving mountain biker.  She wears her signature pearl necklace when she’s about town or chock full of mud in the mountains.  There’s a sense of adventure and freedom that she displays.  She has an air of happiness around her and a zest for life.

Emily Batty is the brand and she does a swell job of portraying herself online through her website which showcases many images that show her sweet yet athletic mud-covered side.  Her girly script logo with a maple leaf (proud canadian) does an okay job of portraying her but a more important detail are the pearls strung subtly at the top of her website.  I have yet to see an image with her not wearing those.  That constant symbol is an important one in her brand.  This connotes that the girly-girl comes before the athlete in a somewhat-gruesome, aggressive sport.

It is my observation that Emily wears pink and purple a lot yet her website’s ‘picked from a default colour wheel teal’ doesn’t seem to fit.  Since her site has so many photos and a great video blog, she would be fine to choose a shade instead of that teal.  If a colour is chosen to represent her, I would look at colour psychology and how she wants to represent herself.  It appears that the teal was not chosen on purpose.

Emily makes a difference in the mountain bike community as displayed through her fostered relationships on social media (Facebook and Twitter).  Through her one-on-one conversations with fans and fellow mountain bike lovers, she shows that she cares and is here for conversations where she uplifts the community.  As Emily fully embraces her femininity, she naturally becomes a unique face of mountain biking, catching the attention of both male admirers and females who look up to her as an inspiration.  I believe it would be easy for Emily to write down her reason for existence in this world, her values and a mission statement.  Putting what she embodies into words would absolutely add to her brand.

The strongest element of her brand is her ability to showcase it through photographs and it’s usually wise to build upon your strengths to make them even stronger.  So, I think that the best way to build upon the ‘chic and grit’ brand she so clearly displays would be to tell her story and give her audience an inside view of her day-to-day through journalistic photographs.  If she’s already on instagram, I didn’t find her.  If she’s not, I’d say that she’s missing an opportunity to expand her fan base to the general athletically inclined.  She could send these photos through to Facebook and Twitter easily on-the-go as the story of her life and adventures unfold.  As a natural inspiration, her story of training photos, tough & muddy mixed with glam girly-fun would captivate her audience to learn more.  So simple, so effective.

On my next blog post, I’ll hone in on Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir who just won another Canadian Championship today.

I’d like to leave you thinking about how you can simply and effectively enhance your brand and tell your story in a way that captivates your audience. Do you have any ideas? Is there something you’d like to add or subtract? Was there a point above that you’re going to take away and try? Commit to it and let me know what it is in the comments below. 🙂

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