Challenge

Increase attendances and build the Everton brand across the club's diverse range of activities. When we began working with Everton in 2001 they had the most basic problem a football club can face: failing to fill their 40,000 capacity stadium, especially for each season's less attractive fixtures. Other symptoms of the general sense of decline were a dwindling Junior Supporters Club with only 3000 members, and disappointing replica kit sales. Yet this was traditionally one of England's most successful clubs with a glorious history, and a passionate fan base just waiting to be re-energised.

Creative thinking

The campaign we developed had a strong, clearly recognisable and ruthlessly enforced design style to hold the Club’s amazingly diverse communications and activities together. This was complemented by a trinity of copy themes: "Blue pride", "Blue passion" and "Blue vision", each with different audience or purpose. “Blue vision” for example, was used for communications aimed at younger Evertonians.

Results

One of our early successes was a tactical campaign to raise attendances for problem matches. As an example of its success, the Leicester City fixture in our first season had a projected attendance of 30,000. The actual attendance after our campaign ran was 35,580. We also successfully relaunched the Junior Supporters Club with a target of recruiting 10,000 members, In fact there were16,000 'JBlues' after the first year. Even more dramatic was the 2002-3 Home Kit campaign featuring Atomic Kitten star and proud Evertonian Liz McLarnon. Launch-day sales were 78% higher than the previous year. More stock was sold in 3 days than had previously been achieved in 3 weeks – making it the club's most successful ever kit launch by a massive margin.