Part Two: The journey to an UNBEATABLE brand

Strategy, The Brief & Insights

Following the introduction to the process of how we built an UNBEATABLE brand for the British Basketball League, this latest post will give an oversight into the strategy, the brief and the insights we used in the opening phases of the brand's development. 

So as we set on this journey (a lengthy, stressful but enjoyable one at that!) to build a game-changing brand to bring the British Basketball League into an exciting new era, we kicked off the process with a thorough insights process. For this, we used an insight-led approach to discover the key areas of opportunity the brand strategy should focus on and address. Unlocking what is valuable for fans and creating guiding principles that articulate the vision for the League as a whole. 

Did you miss Part 1? Read it here

Insights: 

We worked with Max Barnett , Pete Burns , Rich Mills from Deltatre who carried out extensive first-party stakeholder interviews and desk research, which allowed us to discover our active audiences and who we needed to target so the new brand could resonate with fans both in the UK and globally. Their research provided three very definitive audiences to go and target and audience sizing which allowed us to understand our own potential and total opportunity for the league to grow. These audiences were (UK focus):

• Culture Fan (2M audience size): Culture Fans are basketball connoisseurs, in particular of the NBA, and love everything about the culture, that is to say, the art, the music, the fashion and personalities that have defined its rich history. They are engrossed by the sport but also by everything associated with basketball off the court, particularly what the icons of the sport are doing outside of being elite athletes.
• Sports Fan (18M audience size): A sports enthusiast, not surprisingly, loves sport…all sport! Most likely to be male, he strongly associates with all the popular formats and friends and family would say that it plays a large part in his identity,
• Community Fan (2M audience size): Community fans reside in the League’s clubs cities, they may already be fans of the British Basketball League already. The power of sport is a vehicle to make new friends and meet people with shared interests, the demographic of this group was young adults, such as postgraduates. 

As we began to shape the brief and our strategy, we also conducted a series of Stakeholder interviews asking fans, players, coaches - what the League is and where it could go. It was important to us to be aligned with those already deeply connected with the League,

as this helped Identify the ambition that the League wanted to achieve. 

Alongside desk research and stakeholder interviews, as we put the brief together, we had a number of the clubs involved with the process and this was used as a sounding board throughout, providing us with positive and constructive feedback, ensuring that the brand would resonate with them. 

In particular, in the early stages of the development, they had visibility, input and sign-off on the brief itself, allowing them to be brought into the building of the brand as a whole and allowed the League to have clubs represented as we went through the process. The brief  was also shared internally throughout the business to ensure we met key requirements such as (commercial, operations, broadcast, events etc etc.) 

The Strategy: 

The strategy and everything else linked to building the brand had to be driven by the League’s goals which are: 

• To be the most talked about basketball league, in Europe with incredible stories to tell every day: Everyone in Britain should know about the British Basketball League. The appetite and popularity for basketball is there, but awareness of our league & competitions needs to increase. We need to heighten the impact and fan engagement of our events both in real life and online.
• To ignite a new generation of fans' passion for the British Basketball League: Enthusiasm for basketball certainly exists with it being the joint-second most popular team sport among young people (Sport England - Active Lives Survey). Simply put, there is more demand than supply. We are here to make British Basketball more exciting, accessible and entertaining for the next generation of fans.
• To shake up the British sporting landscape: For too long Britain has been dominated by sports that don’t always represent the demand of younger generations. Our aim is to break that status quo and elevate British basketball to being the second biggest sports league in Britain.

These goals would be achieved by creating a brand that reflects the culture of the sport, talks to the audiences from the insights we received and really showcases exactly what the British Basketball League is. This is underpinned by our brand goal:

“ to elevate the British Basketball League to a premier content and entertainment organization that generates joy for its fans, value for its distribution, marketing and licensing partners and which supports its community.”

The Brief: 

By carrying out the above and having an underpinned brand strategy, we were able to work on pulling a brief together for what we wanted to see from the new brand. The repositioning will include the design and development of our outwardly facing assets (lengthy list below!). That should appeal to our newly identified key audiences and clearly convey the core elements of our brand and business. 

One area that has sparked debate and was a big talking point during the rebrand was the naming of our organisation and more widely losing the reference to the acronym “BBL”. When you ask anyone not associated with British basketball what the “BBL” is it is almost certain you’ll get a wide variety of responses (some more rogue than others!). The acronym has an association with the German Basketball Bundesliga and Australia's Big Bash League from a sporting sense alone. Essentially, the BBL was everything but the British Basketball League and the former logo didn’t tell an onlooker that this was the UK’s premier basketball league. 

We needed to make sure that our new brand told everyone exactly what we were and as such we included in the brief that there should be consideration of renaming the league as part of the new brand positioning. 

Link to some of the briefing elements and how we measured success

Watch the Behind the Scenes Video

I hope this provides you with a detailed insight into the volume of energy, details and effort that went into pulling together the strategy and brief to deliver our UNBEATABLE brand. I think this highlights that launching a brand doesn’t happen overnight, it has been a labour of love! In the next part, I will share how we went about selecting our agency to help send British basketball into a revolutionary new chapter.  

As always I welcome your feedback (positive, negative or indifferent!) throughout the series and do feel free to connect with me so you don’t miss the next post or any other exciting developments from the League.

For more on the British Basketball League visit: https://www.britishbasketballleague.com/