Be Wear!

The reality of athletic shoe retailing has been that consumers are driven to the brand names – Nike, Adidas, Puma and the rest – without really caring about where they go to shop. Finish Line, the nation’s second-largest athletic footwear retailer, wants them to begin caring.

So it has launched an integrated, interactive brand campaign to let its customers do the talking. And while it appears the customer is the star of the show, Finish Line hopes that it becomes the center of conversation, a new expression of its hipper, appealing side.

The “Be Heard.” campaign invites consumers to express themselves in a social networking promotion involving TV advertising, Internet marketing and in-store visual merchandising. The TV spots, which began this summer, involve people speaking through their sneakers. “What do your shoes say?” ask the ads. “Be bold,” says a skateboarder’s shoes; “be quick,” says a pair of shoes running up the stairs.

The ads – produced by Upshot Inc. (Chicago) and Finish Line’s internal creative team – are running on carefully selected youth-oriented cable fare like MTV and Adult Swim and on such web sites as Myspace and Facebook. There’s also a Finish Line “microsite” (yourvoiceyourchoice.com), a social web site composed mostly of user-generated content, where people can log on and, that’s right, be heard – uploading photos, selecting music, sharing profiles, posting comments, commenting on their favorite shoe styles and finding others of similar preferences and style. There are also, of course, links that take them to a Finish Line purchasing site.

“We want to disrupt the consumer mindset,” says Kevin Flynn, Finish Line’s senior vp, marketing. “We believe that Be Heard! can stop customers in their tracks. And it’s a message that engages consumers more with our brand.”

The stores themselves will be integrated in the campaign. “Athletic shoe retailers all kind of look the same,” says Brian Kristofek, president of Upshot. “We want to challenge that indifference.” Instead of being divided into sports categories, the stores are organized by catchwords, such as “Be Fresh” for new products; “Be Strong” for basketball shoes; “Be Clean” for casual shoes; and “Be True” for Nike Air Jordans, still the world’s best-selling sneaker brand.

“Shoes are a natural vehicle of self-expression,” says Kristofek, “so we tapped into the idea that shoes speak louder than words.”

Client: The Finish Line Inc., Indianapolis

Marketing and design consultant: Upshot, Chicago

Internet design: Xylem CCI, Denver

Production: Digital Kitchen, Chicago

Photography: Katy Gannon/Upshot Inc., Chicago