‘Reignite the rebel’: Virgin’s top marketer on the brand’s first foray into women’s rugby  

For its first foray into women’s sport, Virgin has created the ‘The Plait Room’ for women’s rugby fans, a digital series taking fans into the locker room through the lens of a crucial insight: most teams have an athlete who is the designated team plaiter.  

The series, created with sports agency HBS and women’s sport consultancy See You at Jeanie’s, follows players speaking together about their experiences of the game and their lives before kick off.

Brands can fall into pitfalls when engaging with women’s sport for the first time, from treating it the same as men’s to adopting a “shrink it and pink it” approach.  

Sam Kelly joined Virgin as its chief experience officer earlier this year, replacing the business’s CMO, and wants to reinvigorate the brand and take it back to its challenger roots.  

Partnering with women’s rugby is one way it’s doing this. One of the biggest problems with women’s sport is brand’s approaching it in a “cookie cutter” style, applying what brand work they were doing in men’s sports to women’s. Virgin Group CMO departs as firm appoints first chief experience officer

Marketers often talk about not wanting to take a ‘slap-on-a-logo’ approach to sports sponsorship, but many brands still do.  

This isn’t Kelly’s goal. Before joining Virgin, he worked agency-side, most recently as global chief marketing officer at AKQA.  

Kelly recalls one big sponsorship deal coming through which was “just a badging exercise” for a brand during his agency career. 

His question to the client was simple: “If you didn’t sponsor this, would the sport be worse off, and would fans be worse off?”  

It’s an ethos he’s brought with him to Virgin. “I’ve always wanted to make sure that we redefine what sport sponsorship looks like for women’s sport, and how it’s not just a logo application, but it’s meaningful and drives things forward.” He notes the language used for The Plait Room is “hyped by Virgin” rather than “sponsored by”.  

Analysis paralysis

Measuring the impact and effectiveness of women’s sport brand partnerships is different from men’s. For rugby, the men’s game is much further ahead than the women’s in terms of brand deals and visibility.  

Kelly explains how he’s had to explain to team members internally that “this isn’t going to get hundreds of millions of views – this is about quality engagement with the right people”.  

“And as we move forward in marketing, it’s not about millions of eyeballs anymore. It’s about quality of conversation and the quality of the engagement.” 

For Laura Weston, cofounder of See You At Jeanie’s, she believes the industry needs “brands who are brave” and there’s not that “many brave brands anymore”.  

And as we move forward in marketing, it’s not about millions of eyeballs anymore. It’s about quality of conversation and the quality of the engagement.

Sam Kelly, Virgin

Brands coming into women’s sport gain brand love and support, she notes, something that Kelly emphasises as what Virgin is going after, since awareness is already high.  

The affection fans and players have for early adopter brands in women’s sport is “not going to last forever”, she adds. “I’ve never understood why more brands haven’t come in earlier, because it’s there for the taking.”  

While the data capabilities brands have access to have rapidly evolved, some marketers are leaning too far on what the data says, versus what they feel, suggests Kelly.  

At a recent event, one CMO stood up and said, “You can’t logic your way into people’s lives.” It stuck with Kelly, who returned to his team at Virgin and said, “data, performance metrics and targeting tools are great, but they’re not what makes your heart skip a beat.”  

This is pertinent to women’s sport, where brands are perhaps reluctant to invest for the first time without the proof of ROI and data. “Brands are telling me unless I can prove it so much before it gets launched, I’m not going to launch it,” says Weston.  

“That’s why women’s sport has been almost stopped in its tracks, because that need to over prove everything,” she adds.  

Reigniting the rebel

Earlier into his career at Virgin, Kelly stood up in front of his team and declared its masterbrand was dead.  

For marketers who’d spent years working on it, this was quite the shock. However, what he meant was a reframing of masterbrand into the “motherbrand”.  

“It was called a masterbrand, and I went, ‘that’s a horrible name’,” says Kelly. Motherbrand instead felt “more creative, more caring” and more attuned to the Virgin way. “Apparently, Richard Branson called it that from the beginning, but somebody changed it somewhere along the line,” he adds.  

He also told his team the business needed to “reignite the rebel”.  How Virgin Atlantic and Great Western Railway defied travel category norms

“Virgin was the original rebel. And by rebel, I don’t mean reckless. We were always the challenger. And if you look at the businesses we’re in, we’re not the biggest in any of those industries, but we have the permission to do things differently and be a challenger,” he explains.  

Tasked with breathing new life into the brand as its first chief experience officer, responsible for marketing, he says, “I want speeding tickets, not parking fines.”  

“Culture moves so fast, we have to move faster,” he adds. It’s Kelly’s first brand role, having spent his career so far in agency leadership. It’s received wisdom that often brands move slower than agencies. “And so, I’m coming in to bring that creative muscle and getting stuff done,” says Kelly, who isn’t a big fan of days spent on endless meetings and paperwork.  

“What’s the point in having meetings and meetings and meetings and decks and decks and decks, and then a year later, you go, ‘Well, it’s not really relevant anymore. The world’s moved on’.”  

He’s bringing a test and learn approach to Virgin. “Let’s try it, see what happens and we can build from there,” he says.