Objective

Many brands have tried to make their mark in gaming by creating standalone, branded worlds, and expecting gamers to seek them out. These brands made headlines by dropping expensive in-game items and rarely saw positive coverage across trusted games media. 

Coach recognised that this approach wasn’t truly resonating. Gamers weren’t being met in the spaces they already occupy, missing the chance to connect with luxury brands in an authentic way. Coach understood that an innovative solution was needed to break down barriers to entry and foster more authentic, meaningful connections with the gaming community.

The key objectives of this campaign were to:

• Reach a new female Gen-Z audience (13+) that may not otherwise engage with Coach on traditional channels and engage them in a more meaningful way
• Reinforce Coach’s position as the leader in expressive luxury
• Increase Coach’s brand awareness and consideration through positive media and social coverage of its gaming campaign
• Build awareness for the “Find Your Courage” Spring 2024 campaign and the campaign’s hero item, the quilted Tabby bag 
• Engagement benchmarks:
  • 26.7M minutes spent on Roblox
  • 1.87M engagement with Coach UGC
  • 16.75M organic views on Coach UGC

To effectively meet these objectives, Coach expanded on its campaign's themes of self-expression and the multiplicities of self, and delivered three virtual experiences on leading digital platforms that embodied the spring campaign’s different motifs.

Strategy

To authentically connect with digital natives and inspire creative self-expression, Coach launched an integrated gaming campaign for fashion-oriented Gen Z. Across three month-long takeovers on key gaming platforms, Coach empowered gamers to show off every pixel of their personal style, building off themes from its Spring 2024 "Find Your Courage" campaign. These takeovers highlighted core visual themes and the campaign's hero item–the quilted Tabby bag–in experiences on ZEPETO and Roblox's top fashion experiences.

Coach debuted into gaming by partnering with established digital destinations, meaning that the brand was able to uniquely cater to existing audiences with luxury virtual fashion. Iterating on brand takeovers of the past, Coach designed numerous creative implementations that spanned UGC (user generated content), virtual wearables, styling competitions, a cross-experience scavenger hunt, and highly stylised rethemes that worked together to immerse the player in the different worlds of the campaign.

The launch of this strategy was accomplished through a multivertical approach, spanning paid and earned influencer content, media previews, product seeding and an exclusive launch event at the brand’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. 

In order to generate impactful gaming media coverage, Coach prioritised outreach to top tier gaming media to produce trusted coverage that would resonate with gaming audiences. This outreach included hands-on previews of the takeovers, and exclusive interview access to Coach C-suites, including the brand’s VP of Marketing for North America and the SVP of Global Visual Experience. 

Beyond media outreach, and building on Gen-Z’s preference for influencer-driven product recommendations, Coach enlisted the support of trusted macro and micro creators across Roblox, ZEPETO and variety gaming genres to engage with their target audience. These creators were carefully audited and selected for their relevance as fashion-forward, platform-native creators with a strong following of Gen-Z gamers. 

Emphasising Gen-Z favoured vertical platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, Coach provided these creators with access to the games for shortform video, and gifted Tabby handbags and sunglasses from the Spring 2024 collection to showcase on socials. Select influencers were also given additional Tabby bags to host giveaways to their own community, boosting brand awareness and tying in the physical collection with the virtual fashion across all three takeovers. 

Creating a memorable and shareable moment, alongside the seeded product, Coach crafted bespoke "FROW tickets" and modelling comp cards to share with a select number of its influencers. These served as a nod to Coach's roots as a fashion brand, and as a personalised memento for a surprise unboxing experience. 

Further leveraging this carefully crafted network of influencers, Coach invited these creators to attend a launch event at its flagship store in New York. At the launch event, creators were able to get hands-on with the takeovers at dedicated gaming stations, and collaborated on broader content that embodied the campaign’s key message of virtual self-expression.

Following the event, Coach made these gaming stations open to the public across the launch weekend to empower everyday consumers to dive into gaming and express every pixel of their personal style.

Results

Gaming can be an intimidating space to play in, but Coach won the community over.

Media Results

• 121 pieces of editorial coverage
• Total reach of 847 million UMV
• 100% non-negative sentiment

Brand Impact

• Coach saw a 9.7% increase in brand favourability overall, an 18.3% increase in purchase intent, and a 19.5% increase in consideration.
• Coach moved up 5 spaces in the Lyst Index for Hottest Brands of Q3 2024, citing their gaming launch as the first reason for their increased position.

Gaming Platform Engagement

• The takeovers on Roblox saw over 13.5 million visits, alongside 729.8K creations in the Coach ZEPETO photo booths, and 4.24M try-ons of Coach virtual wearables.
• These takeovers resulted in a 1,756% increase in visitors to Fashion Klossette in the first weekend alone, alongside 20,000 limited edition Coach virtual wearables being claimed within 3 hours.

ZEPETO

• 30M+ views on Coach content
• 2.2M comments on #coachxzepeto content
• 2.9M total engagement on Coach content

Roblox

• 97.5M minutes spent with the brand
• 670K unique users walking the Coach runway

Influencer Results

• 17M people reached
• 269 earned posts across Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube
• 20 paid posts across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
• 199,527 total likes across paid and earned social media
• 11,408 total shares across paid and earned social media 
• 5,244,238 total views across paid and earned social media 
• 6,333 total comments across paid and earned social media

Media