IF YOU WATCH a lot of Southeastern Conference sports on TV, as I do, it’s hard to ignore all the advertising done by the retailer Academy Sports. I’m past the point of buying a lot of sports equipment. Still, I’m drawn to the commercials. They portray a store environment that’s open, fun, bright and friendly. The store is definitely the lead player in the clever, lively ads.
Yet it’s a chain I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never seen an Academy Sports store. In fact, I hadn’t heard of the brand before I began seeing these ads. I don’t know where their stores are, of if there are any here in my area.
So I jumped to attention on Thanksgiving morning when I opened my newspaper and saw a big multi-page ad insert for Academy Sports. Curious, I scanned the entire insert for some information on store locations, but I didn’t find any.
Maybe the months of sheltering at home have addled my brain, but it took me a couple of minutes to remember that so many retailers aren’t so much inviting you to their stores anymore as directing you to their websites. I looked at all the other print ads in the holiday shopping package, and there were many without any store locations. Of course, some – the supermarkets, the liquor stores, the pharmacies, the mass merchandisers, the takeout restaurants, the home goods centers, the dollar stores, the consumer electronics stores – still encourage shoppers to come in for normal shopping, holiday shopping and, naturally, Black Friday door-buster sales. But most have more intensely focused their strategies on the safety and convenience of digital shopping, ever since COVID-19 drove people inside and shut retail doors over the last nine months.
And so the industry enters a very different holiday season. Physical retail has been diminishing over the past 20 years. Nearly 10,000 stores closed nationally even before the pandemic. Now there’s a prediction of another 25,000 store closures by year-end, according to Coresight Research. And the tsunami shift to digital marketing has been rendered almost entirely complete in this year of enormous societal change, fear and the need for safety and health. Amazon has record employment and $6 billion in revenue. While Neiman Marcus, which once was the ultimate marketer of the in-store experience, is gone.
It turns out that Academy Sports + Outdoor, its full name, has about 250 stores throughout the Southeast and the Midwestern heartlands. It’s based in Katy, Texas, (near Houston), and was started in 1938, but it really took off in the 1980s. By 1990, it was selling more cowboy boots than anyone in the country, and more Texas state fishing licenses than Houston-based Oshman’s Sporting Goods, which was one of the powerful regional megastore sports retailers when “megastore” meant something. Like a lot of those sporting goods giants – Sports Authority, Gander Mountain, Herman’s, Modell’s, Galyan’s and others (a sad list from a sad chapter in U.S. retail history) – Oshman’s folded its 260-store empire in 2005.
But Academy Sports is still going, and apparently successfully. It’s now owned by the New York investment firm KKR and reports revenues of approximately $5 billion. It completed the paperwork for an IPO in August.
So Academy has managed to remain a success story, but that’s not really the point of this. The point is that, while it surely depends on online sales for the bulk of its business, you wouldn’t know it from their ads. Smiling, active, athletic young staffers run through the aisles, tossing footballs and casting fishing rods, tumbling and roller blading, popping out of camping tents, tossing footballs, shooting hoops and nine irons.
It’s such a charming and nostalgic homage to the days when stores were filled with shelves and racks of merchandise and eager and involved shoppers packed the aisles. I’m not sure if the stores themselves fulfill the promises, but the ads cry, “Come to our store, test our goods, meet our ruddy-faced, outdoorsy employees.” And the eight-page Thanksgiving Day circular, loaded with product shots and promotional copy, is like one you might have seen in your Thanksgiving Day morning paper 40 years ago.
The circular is filled with references to the traditional holiday store hours and curbside pickup information. But where are you, Academy? To find that information, the circular gently leads you to academy.com. Which is where it really wants you, after all.
Still, the marketing is a new version on the old holiday feelings, and the warm nostalgia feels oh so good. Apparently, it works, too.