Diadora’s Antonio Gnocchini on the power of discovery

Heritage sports brands may be tempted to rely on their history to appeal to a new generation that wasn’t there to see it. But in the fast-moving digital attention economy, that’s a mistake, says Antonio Gnocchini, chief marketing officer at Diadora.

He joins The Big Impression podcast to explain how the iconic Italian brand is reclaiming its spot in the performance market. By leaning into a challenger brand mindset during the Paris 2024 Olympics — without the price tag of official sponsorship — Gnocchini and his team are shifting the focus from nostalgia to high-performance innovation.

 

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

Damian Fowler (00:00):

I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today, we're looking at how a heritage sportswear brand carved out its own spotlight at the Paris 2024 Olympics without being an official sponsor. My guest is Antonio Gnocchini, Chief Marketing Officer at Diadora, the iconic Italian brand known for its made in Italy craftsmanship. In the lead of the Paris, Antonio and his team launched a global brand campaign built around Diadora's roster of Italian athletes from Trackstar, Larissa, Yapacino, defensers and speed skaters, all while showcasing innovations like the Atomo Running Shoe. That's the first high mileage running shoe made in Italy in three decades. We're going to break down how Diadora timed its campaign to maximize the Olympic moment, how it differentiates itself from giants like Nike and LVMH, and what this strategy says about building awareness in a crowded high-stakes marketing landscape. So let's get into it.

(01:07):

Antonio, can you tell us about why the Paris Olympics was such an important moment for Diadora as it sought to elevate its brand name again?

Antonio Gnocchini (01:18):

So if you are a multi-category sport brand, Olympics is certainly the big event, the main event, your main catwalk of the main show. And you prepare for it for a long time because you need to be in one of the most competitive environment with the best product, competitive athletes. Everything needs to be perfect. And it's also one of those moments in which you can go deeper with attention, with messages. If you are serious about sport and you want to communicate, sport brand values, what you really stand for, it's not easy, especially today in moments in which the attention is not much, few seconds from everybody. Channels are very fast and flattened messages very easily. The Olympics is a moment in which for a few weeks you have the attention. You have people connected and engaged. You have people who care. And so it's a perfect environment to talk again about what you stand for.

(02:41):

And so going back to the Olympics was a statement to say, we actually are a competitive sport brands, a performance brand, not only lifestyle of it. And so yeah, it was such an important environment for us. Also, these Olympics was maybe one of the first ones that I've seen since I started doing this job when you could see some challengers brands activating and being visible.

(03:15):

In the past, this was really an event only for main sponsors and official sponsors mostly. Now this is a moment of challengers. And if you find the right way and if you had a good connection with your outlets, you could be doing a successful marketing campaigns and actions.

Damian Fowler (03:35):

That's really interesting to hear you say that. And I think, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is the kind of media environment that we exist in now, does that make it possible for challenger brands to find a way to reach audiences that they otherwise might not be able to find back when it was the main TV channels and big glossy mags, there are more niches now in many ways.

Antonio Gnocchini (04:00):

There's a very interesting report that Business of Fashion and McKinsey release every year. And the most recent one was a study from McKinsey, which they were showing displaying how the sport market, which was dominated by only few incumbents. And you could see that at Olympics, still today, the most recent one, the usual suspects are dominated most of the sports. But in this past few years, there is a change going on in which incumbents are really under pressure from Challengers brand in the sport industry. They're gaining momentum. Challenges are gaining space, gaining market share, and also visibility. And you can say that maybe this is linked to the explosion of running as a global movement, but it's not only that. Running certainly as contributed, because running is one of those categories that is really extremely democratic. And yeah, sure, track and field main athletes, famous names help, but you can become a successful running brand without having only the most amazing hundred meters runners.

(05:37):

You can be successful by working in other ways. And you see brands starting to become more visible through running in the sport industry.

Damian Fowler (05:47):

What's interesting about Diadora is that it has this very significant legacy as a sports brand. I mean, I think back to my childhood when I used to absolutely love Beyond Borg. And as soon as I saw the name Diadora, I remember Borg. And of course there's other soccer legends like Roberto Baggio or Francesco Totti. But in recent years, it's been a little bit maybe eclipsed by bigger brands that you just mentioned. So you're a challenger brand, but you're also a legacy brand. Could you explain a bit more of the context around the history of the brand?

Antonio Gnocchini (06:24):

If you are passionate about sport, when you land at Diadora and you visit the museum, it is a kid in a candy store. That was my experience at the museum is you could see in real life the objects of desire of your youth. In my bedroom, I had posters of all these heroes and there's a moment, there's a scene in King Richard with Will Smith, in which you hear for a moment in the movie, you hear Venus and Serena Williams coach telling Richard Williams to wait on the Nike offer because the perfect offer for any tennis player at the time was the one Jennifer Capriati was getting from Diadora. When I watched the movie, I was like, whoa. So we wear really the tennis brand and the brand that was in relation with athletes, especially tennis athletes. We were the tennis athletes brand. What happened?

(07:34):

I think that the brand, the company really focused for few decades on product, product marketing, sports marketing contracts, traditional marketing actions. While in the meantime, other brands, other sport brands have become very sophisticated, very innovative in their marketing strategies, films where Nike's main language and they were exciting product of their marketing department. I think the brand here, the Theodo has been focusing on other things and lost the engagement with consumers globally. And then for a few years, as I was saying, the focus had been really on capitalizing on its legacy and becoming more of a lifestyle brand. But in reality, the market can tell you that if you're not serious about sport, you lose your credibility as a lifestyle of sport brand.

Damian Fowler (08:42):

Yeah. So the new campaign or the more recent campaign is about reasserting that sports connection. How else would you define the brand as it is now?

Antonio Gnocchini (08:57):

I think that what we needed to do ... So the first thing that I wanted to do is to prove that the sensation, the feeling that we had was correct. So we run a long and insightful brand health monitor study, and the results of that study was showing that, yes, that we were a legacy brand, people recognized the name, but they couldn't really link it any longer to specific performance product, and they were not buying performance product any longer from the Adora. So we were also associated linked to values like being Italian, but at the same time, it was this idea of romantic Italian, quaint, Italian, traditional. If you want to be successful in sports, you have to talk about innovation, you have to be recognized for your capacity of being a technological advanced company. And so the main effort for us in the beginning was to go back into making sure that our research and development center was up to speed and that the marketing department was capable of telling these type of stories because these stories were in fact very important for our consumer, for our focused consumers, the focus of our target, a younger consumer that wanted to talk about sport, they wanted to be capable also of discovering innovative brand sports.

(10:44):

So even if we were not one of the main incumbents by being authentic in sport, especially in running and in other categories, by being authentic, we could engage with this young consumers who was interested in discovering new brands that have an innovation angle that was really relevant.

Damian Fowler (11:11):

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I'm interested to hear you talk a bit more about that audience group that you really wanted to reach and the profile of that group. And presumably there's an element of conquesting going on because you've got to get them from some of the bigger names that we've already talked about.

Antonio Gnocchini (11:29):

Yeah. As I was saying, running has become one of those category, goes beyond just track and field, goes beyond the daily jogger, goes beyond ... It is really something that touches wellness, fashion is playing into running a lot. Everybody is doing running collections today, not just the usual suspects. We wanted to make sure that in this environment in which you had a lot of noise, we could be recognized as authentic, as separate from the noise. So we wanted to talk with a niche and then make sure that that authentic young athlete was putting the mileage out. So it wasn't talking about running, but putting also the miles and the sweat in running. There were those consumers that were scheduling all their weekends around the run, around the race, so the real authentic runner could recognize that we weren't distracted by all this running noise. We were serious.

(12:48):

So our messages were we run a campaign that is called Normalize iMileage that was directed only to that type of consumers that could recognize the acts and the gestures and the typical struggle of that type of runners. Even if that meant alienating for a little bit a wider audience, because we know that with a wider audience, we had less capacity of rich. We didn't have the muscle for them. But we see today that when you are authentic and strong with that type of niche, that niche creates expansion and creates influence, and then you start to resonate also in other markets and with other type of consumers.

Damian Fowler (13:39):

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about how you set the stage leading up to Paris to build that buzz that's going to resonate across all these different outlets?

Antonio Gnocchini (13:51):

Yeah. We decided, as you can imagine, getting attention is ex extremely difficult, especially today. The new channels are flattening everything and everything is so few fraction of a seconds between your thumb and in your face, it's very hard to go deeper with messages. And if you want to go deeper, you need to find ways in which you can. And for us, our strategy was, okay, we need to stop their attention, stop their eyes for longer.

Damian Fowler (14:35):

I'm curious now to see, given the kind of media exposure that you started to establish, how did it play out during and after the Olympics, and how did you capitalize on it essentially?

Antonio Gnocchini (14:49):

So we monitor during the main events at the Arsenal, we made sure that all the guests and all the people, all the stakeholders of sport were well-informed and also capable of giving the right message out with the proper information. And then we started collecting and amplify this type of information, then feed them also to our partners in the market, retailers, key accounts. All of this helped us make sure that the product was properly displayed and also was selling out in the right moment in time. And by being nimble and agile and fast, we had a great success on this. The content that we had created, we noticed that they were getting a completion rate of 97, 98%. We never had completion rates so high. So we knew that we had something that was resonating. We only needed to be insisting on it and fasting the reaction by feeding athletes, giving the same content to them, and that's it.

Damian Fowler (16:08):

And you mentioned that 97% completion rate on videos and things like that. That's obviously an important metric. What else did you do to measure brand buzz? And then maybe then how did you connect that to sales?

Antonio Gnocchini (16:21):

Every year we do a brand study, a brand health monitor in order to understand the feeling and how our values are perceived by consumers. If there is any change in what we're doing that is affecting their point of view on the brand. Then we do social monitoring on a daily base, especially when we post and when we have athletes performing our.com and a good connection with key accounts, get us data on results and how what we do resonates on the market. That's pretty much what keep us informed and get us a good understanding of what we're doing.

Damian Fowler (17:05):

How did this push around Paris help define the current market right now? And what does it also tell you about where you should build next?

Antonio Gnocchini (17:15):

It is a confirmation that it is a challenger moment. It is a confirmation that if you establish a conversation with your consumers, you can expand and you can gain market in a market that was completely polarized and dominated by only a few brands. It is also confirmation that if you are authentic, at times, maybe even very vertical in your attack to the market through the category, we don't do every sport. We only are focusing now on few sports, but to do them with authenticity, this is also resonating a lot and you have to be ready for sport moments, which means every sport moment that it's not only Olympics, even minor sport moments, if you're capable of being ready and capitalize on it with your athletes, it's a great tool.

Damian Fowler (18:20):

You talked about using innovation, being on the cutting edge to reach a new generation of fans, but do you also still infuse that with some of the golden age narrative that Diadora has? Yes,

Antonio Gnocchini (18:33):

We do. We balance. We try to balance the messaging in that sense, but I think what I've learned in this past few years here is that this is no longer the sneaker culture generation where you could go and have long session and education and talk about the history of that specific model, and you would have this passionate nerd of Sneakers that would then storytell the whole thing to Hollist friends and everybody were buying into it. Everybody was buying into it. I think every time we preach about our history, every time about we try to give lessons, especially the younger generation, it doesn't seem to be interesting and doesn't like it also. But what we see that they like is what they discover. So we have to be ready with the right information. We have to give them a story that is compelling in term of product, in term of innovation, and then let them discover the history behind it, the art, let's say, the origin of the whole story, and where is this coming from?

(19:54):

So maybe one thing that I'm seeing that it's also a learning is the fact that brands ... I've seen brands just trying to capitalize on the fact that one product story has to be successful because it's linked to this specific moment in time, and you consumers should know about it and should buy about it because of that. It doesn't really resonate to consumer any longer. You need more than that. And so, yeah.

Damian Fowler (20:27):

I love that. I think it's so interesting to hear you say you can't preach to consumers, but you can allow them the opportunity to discover. I think that's such a great insight. I think that goes for any storytelling, to be honest.

Antonio Gnocchini (20:45):

I think you're right, but I think it's specifically more valid now in which I believe that you need to have your story perfect and you need to have the details of your story needs to be really well done. People think that you can simply post in every second and be very fast in making sure that consumers will see fresh things every second, digest it very quickly, and then post new ones. Especially for us, this doesn't prove to be right.

Damian Fowler (21:24):

I had a good guest on this podcast a few editions ago who talked about how brand messaging is in everything, the tactile element of the brand. He used Harley Davidson as an example, it's not just a bike, it's everything you encounter in the showroom, the quality of the materials. And I'm getting that sense when I look at Diadora and the Diadora site that their brand messaging comes through in the product line.

Antonio Gnocchini (21:55):

This is very true and very valid. Again, if you want to be serious in your relationship, in your conversation with that niche audience, it means that every touchpoint, every single touchpoint needs to tell something about that story, otherwise they will immediately perceive that it's not authentic

Damian Fowler (22:21):

Any longer. So let me ask you big picture here. So for marketers listening, what's the lesson here that you can tell? You came from Nike, but now you're at Diadora. So you've seen what the big heavyweight brand has done and can do, but what can a smaller brand learn from your experience, I guess, whether it be about future forward channels like CTV or retail media or programmatic or social? Sorry, let me just ask you ask that more simply. What can a marketer learn from your experience trying to market this, bring this brand back into view? I

Antonio Gnocchini (23:04):

Think the most important thing for us has been to be capable of focusing on doing few things and do them perfectly, or at least as perfect as we could do. You are challenged to be very active and be reactive and also try to capitalize on every single product you have in the line and every sport that is played is an opportunity of doing something. The reality is if you want to start to resonate, you need to establish a valid conversation with your core focused consumers. And to do that, you need focus. And this means also at times being capable of saying no to things that you could be doing or that you get pressure from anybody or everybody in the company to do, and also the pressure from the market many times. Again, let's remember that this was a market in which you were supposed to drop a new product every few weeks, so we don't do that.

(24:23):

And we try to talk about innovation only when we have real innovation to communicate. And then when you do build an authentic story and a strong story with every touchpoint connected in the right way, this to me proved to be successful.

Damian Fowler (24:44):

Going back to Paris, that was obviously a huge high watermark for sport last year. As you look ahead to next year, is there anything that's on your calendar that's one of those moments where brand and moment have that synchronicity?

Antonio Gnocchini (25:01):

Olympics is not something that you prepare the season before. So next Olympics is already something that we are studying, preparing for, sweating about. We have to prepare all our innovations. We have to be ready with the right messaging. We have to find the right athletes, and we have to have a strategy on what type of messages we want to focus on. So LA Olympics is certainly something that we look at and we dream of.

Damian Fowler (25:40):

Let me turn to the last section here and just ask you some quick fire questions, if I may. One of the things I wanted to ask you is, is there a sports marketing trend that you think is overrated?

Antonio Gnocchini (25:51):

Maybe there is something that is a bit underrated, which is the fact that some lesser known sport events and maybe not the main athletes, but the local athletes, they are underrated. You can build excellent engaging campaign through those.

Damian Fowler (26:17):

What matters more in the next five years? Heritage, innovation, or cultural storytelling?

Antonio Gnocchini (26:24):

If I may try to put them in order, I would say cultural storytelling for me, then innovation and then heritage. If you do cultural storytelling well, I think your legacy, your heritage is probably already well told in there, but I think that you, again, it's a moment in time which I will never stop stressing the fact that you need to be capable in storytelling properly.

Damian Fowler (26:57):

Is there anything missing in the ad marketplace today that you perceive?

Antonio Gnocchini (27:01):

Data that goes beyond just the reach of a campaign. And even the reach at times is not really ... And not everything is so perfect and reliable. If you could find a way ... You remember where you were studying marketing and the sentence from Wanamaker, I don't know which half of my money spent is wasted. I go back to that. I've been promised by these new tools and these new digital tools that I will know better, but it seems that to be capable of really reading through the noise and getting valuable data that goes just beyond rich, it's still hard and it's still at times not that reliable. And then the other thing is I see an inflation in the attention economy that makes me think that I need to find new ways and new channels and not only finding great storytelling. The reality is my stories, if I even have a great way of telling, if even when I have a great story, at times I need to change it and distort it in order to be played in these new environments, in new digital channels.

(28:40):

These channels at times distort the values of my brand, and I want that not to happen. So I need to find better ways and better channels.

Damian Fowler (28:55):

And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression. This show is produced by Molten Heart. Our theme is by Love and Caliber and our associate producer is Sydney Cairns. And remember.

Antonio Gnocchini (29:04):

I think the most important thing for us has been to be capable of focusing on doing few things and do them perfectly.

Damian Fowler (29:15):

I'm Damian, and we'll see you next time.

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