Would you be willing or willing to tattoo a brand logo? What would have to happen for you to do it? What attributes would that brand have to have for you to be encouraged to do it?
Ironman is the brand behind long-distance triathlon. Ironman has managed to position itself as the generic name for the entire line, as is the case with others such as Kleenex for disposable tissues. Virtually no one says: “I will try a long distance triathlon”; Whoever tries to swim 3.8 kilometers, pedal 180 kilometers and run 42,195 kilometers in a single day, refers to it as “trying Ironman”.
Completing an Ironman fills the athlete and on many occasions the people around him with pride, due to the great physical and mental deployment necessary, but incredibly, the experience reaches the point that a large number of athletes decide to tattoo the logo of the brand on some part of your body, even at the risk of violating some copyrights.
The Ironman brand has achieved enormous objectives: market leadership, very important economic value, positioning as a powerful generic and such a deep relationship with its consumers that they are willing to wear it on their skin in a perpetual way.
The sport that began in Honolulu as a test to find out which athlete, among swimmers, runners and cyclists, would have greater physical capacity, began to grow as a brand in 1980, after some competitions began to develop in different parts of the world. . Valerie Silk, the first owner, sold the brand to surgeon Pitt Gills in the late eighties for $ 3 million. Starting in 1998, the brand’s growth was exponential and explosive, and by 2008, it turned out that its value reached 100 million dollars. The current price of it is calculated above 700 million dollars.
The Ironman Group is the world’s largest operator of massive sporting events with the participation of approximately one million participants per year, with activities in more than 55 countries.
Ironman, in addition to being a brand and a business group, is the name given to a sport, in which an athlete with a very specific profile participates. However, beyond that, Ironman has become a culture that has transcended to the degree that its users and consumers are willing to give time and important effort of their lives, to participate in it and, if that were not enough, to get their tattoos logo on the skin.