Back to school with a new campaign
Intersport's back-to-school campaign this year is not really about school. It is about what sport gives a child that no classroom can — belonging, resilience, a reason to keep going.
There is a particular temptation, when building a seasonal campaign, to reach for the obvious. New season, new gear, new you. It is efficient. It is forgettable. Intersport's "Sport bygger drömmar" goes somewhere else entirely — and in doing so, it reveals a clear understanding of what a retailer with genuine long-term ambitions must become: not a store, but a belief.
The product is not the point
When Monica Jusu Bah speaks in this campaign, she is not talking about her boots. She talks about patience. About not measuring yourself against others. About her mother, who taught her to work hard and keep moving forward. These are not marketing messages. They are the kind of truths that stay with a person.
That is precisely why they work. Intersport is not selling a football. It is attaching itself to something parents already believe in and children already feel — that sport can shape you. The brand borrows that meaning. Carefully, and with the right voice.
Authenticity is earned through specificity
The campaign does not use a generic group of smiling children. It uses young players from Sävedalens IF — a real club, a real community. That specificity matters. Anyone can say "we support youth sport." Fewer brands are willing to name the club, show the actual faces, let the local story carry the weight.
Nike has built decades of equity doing exactly this: not claiming universality from the top down, but finding the particular story that makes the universal feeling land. Intersport is working from the same logic, with considerably more warmth and considerably less noise.
What this does for the brand over time
A campaign like this is not just communication. It is a positioning deposit. Every time Intersport associates itself with community, courage and the quiet work of growing up, it moves further from "sports retailer" and closer to "partner in sport." That shift is slow and cumulative — which is why most brands avoid it, and why the ones who commit to it end up owning ground no competitor can buy.
Trust is built in exactly this register: personal, consistent, rooted in something that does not expire when the season changes.
At BBMB, this is the kind of work we find most interesting — not the campaign itself, but the strategic intention underneath it. When a brand knows what it stands for, the brief writes itself.