Coach: Self-Expression through Gaming

Coach redefined branded gaming activations by respecting the nuances of gaming culture, delivering a luxury fashion experience that aligned with gamers' identities.

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 motifs and the campaign's hero item–the quilted Tabby bag–in experiences on ZEPETO and Roblox.

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 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 campaign.

This was promoted through an integrated strategy that spanned paid and earned influencer content, media previews, product seeding and a launch event at Coach’s flagship store in New York City.

To generate impactful gaming media coverage, Coach prioritised outreach to top tier endemic media, offering hands-on previews and exclusive interview access to Coach C-suites, to produce coverage that would resonate with its audiences.

Coach also enlisted the support of trusted macro and micro creators across Roblox, ZEPETO and variety gaming genres to further engage their target audience. These creators were selected for their relevance as fashion-forward, platform-native creators with a strong Gen-Z following.

Coach provided them with access to the games for video creation, and gifted Tabby handbags and sunglasses from the Spring 2024 collection to showcase on socials. Select influencers were given additional bags to host giveaways with their communities, boosting brand awareness, and tying in the physical collection with virtual fashion.

Further leveraging this network, Coach invited creators to attend a launch event at its flagship store in New York City. At the launch event, influencers 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 self-expression.