Central Sports
The Home of Badminton
Reinventing a heritage brand with a complete design refresh and ongoing, always-on content-driven marketing.
Branding. Words. Pictures. Video. Website.
The objective
Central Sports has been respected in the badminton market for more than four decades and Sporting Eric was tasked with creating a new brand look and feel, new e-commerce website together with an ecosystem of supporting social media channels and ecrm.
What we did
We completely redesigned the brand giving it a fresh contemporary feel but ensured the ‘Home of badminton’ ethos – a club where every player is welcome – was at the heart of the offering. With a completely new ecommerce platform, the user journey was vastly improved, and content played a key role in attracting new customers to Central Sports, while also ensuring the loyal existing customer base was well catered for. As part of an ongoing, multi-channel content calendar we activated partnerships with badminton icons such as Chris Adcock with advice-driven content, then celebrated the clubs across the UK with a video series based on the people who play at grassroots level. Social channels spoke daily to our audience with the best curated and bespoke content in the sport.
What happened
A year-on-year sales increase of 60%, allowing the brand to break the seven-figure sales mark for the first time in our first full year. Within three months, our social campaign delivered a reach of 2.7m on Instagram and a 391% increase on Facebook. In the case of Instagram, we grew to 10.9k followers [from zero] in that same period of time. Our weekly content-driven emails also delivered – providing average open rates of 31 per cent, click through rates of 4 per cent, and delivering sales of more than £200,000.
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“Sporting Eric have been a one-stop marketing and creative shop for us, they’ve not only reinvented the brand for the modern era, they’ve also built new platforms and consistently found creative ways to engage our audience and ultimately helped make us the number one retailer for badminton in the UK.”
— Wai Lim, CEO, Central Sports