What football teaches us about brand strategy

Tom Love, co-founder and creative director at LoveGunn, reveals the best tactics for rebranding a football club.

Trying to appeal to everyone is the fastest way to matter to no one.

As a branding agency, our strategists hear it constantly. "We want to appeal to everyone." "We don't want to alienate anyone." "We need something that works across all our audiences." It sounds responsible. It sounds commercially sensible. It is neither.

The moment a brand tries to mean something to everyone, it stops meaning anything to anyone. You water the positioning down. The tone becomes friendly but forgettable. The identity ticks every box and sparks nothing. You end up with a brand that offends no one — which is another way of saying no one cares.

Football teaches us this more clearly than anything else.

When LoveGunn rebranded Oxford United with Dream Inspire, one of the first things we had to resist was the instinct to make the brand work for everyone. New fans. Old fans. Local supporters. National audience. Commercial partners. The club, understandably, wanted all of them. But a brand built for all of them would have moved none of them.

The real work was finding what was specifically, genuinely true about Oxford United. And what we found surprised us.

Oxford is a city defined by one of the most famous universities in the world. The football club and the university serve very different communities — different audiences, different cultures, different worlds. The assumption is that there's an intrinsic relationship between them. There isn't. But when we looked harder, something else emerged. Underneath the obvious differences was a shared belief. That you can be more than where you started. That achievement isn't reserved for the privileged few. That a dream is worth pursuing regardless of where you come from.

Dream Inspire. That was the Brand Truth. Not a tagline we invented. Something that was already true about this city, this club and the people who give their Saturdays to it. We just found the words.

When you get it right, something happens that no campaign can manufacture. The people it was made for feel it immediately. And feeling is contagious.

When LoveGunn created Powered by Passion — the brand partnership proposition and campaign for MG and Arsenal, the same discipline applied. The temptation with any commercial partnership is to smooth the edges so both parties feel represented. But smoothing edges is how you end up with something neither side is proud of. The question we kept asking was what's true about both of these brands, and how do we tell that story in a way that feels like it belongs. Specificity again. Not breadth.

Specificity gets mistaken for limitation. Being for someone specific feels like leaving money on the table. It doesn't. The brands worth talking about – worth following, worth paying more for – all started somewhere particular. Nike started with runners. Not athletes. Runners. The mass appeal came decades later, as a result of meaning, not instead of it.

The commercial case for specificity is overwhelming. A smaller group of people who genuinely believe in what you're doing will always outperform a large group who feel nothing. They stay longer. They spend more. They tell other people. They defend you. You cannot buy that with a bigger media budget.

Start with the right people. Say something true. Make sure they feel it.

Everyone else will follow.