Celebrity sponsorships are a great opportunity to reach a wider audience, but it’s not enough to secure a big name to plug your product and call it a day. When it comes to cultivating influencer partnerships that create a real impact, you need to be strategic at every turn—ensuring alignment with your purpose and audience.
Take it from Michelle Lazar on episode 7 of our podcast, My Best Campaign. Michelle’s career has seen her touch compelling campaigns at every level with the likes of lululemon, Kit and Ace, Bailey Nelson, Athleta, Smash + Tess and Daye. She’s a wealth of behind-the-scenes intel, and when she sat down with our founder Amanda, she pulled back the curtain on what it really takes to launch and maintain lasting partnerships with influencers, athletes and household names—and what she shared is applicable to businesses of all sizes.
Here are our favourite takeaways from this interview:
1. Set your partnership up for success
After announcing an influencer partnership, what happens next? Michelle made a great point when she shared this:
“The story has to be deeper than ‘We launched this partnership’. I believe it’s so important to caretake these relationships and have the right structures internally set up so you don’t drop the ball. Beyond just selling a product or your services, your brand needs ongoing brand awareness and storytelling content to connect, engage and build community.”
—Michelle Lazar
While working at Athleta, Michelle shared that the brand had a packed calendar of seasonal priorities, and it could be easy to lose momentum if you weren’t prioritizing your partnerships. Launching a new partnership is exciting, but how it filters into all your content and messaging is far more important. For Athleta, that meant staying ahead at all times: ensuring the marketing team was planning content in advance so they were always finding the right message and the right angle—keeping an eye on opportunities to bring in influencers for timely events, like national awareness days. The result? A consistent tie-back to your brand purpose and elevating your influencers, so they become a regular association with your brand.
2. Stay adaptable and supportive
Brands partner with influencers to connect deeper with the everyday realities of their audiences. So that means when your influencers face real-life challenges, you need to be prepared to support them wholeheartedly. For example, when Athleta announced their partnership with Simone Biles, it was an iconic moment that ended up being Athleta’s biggest media day ever in their 25-year history. They cheered her on all the way to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and then the unpredictable happened: Simone pulled out of the Olympics to prioritize her mental health.
A traditional athletic brand may have thought, “This is an upset” if they were only in a partnership with Simone for the sake of her athletic performance. But Athleta embraced her bold decision and stuck by her side. Ultimately, they viewed Simone’s decision as courageous *and* as a reflection of their brand purpose: to enhance women’s well-being, which includes mental health.
“It’s such an opportunity to live out your brand values where any other brand would see it as a crisis to solve. [Athleta] was able to lean into it as a brand and really reinforce what you believed in.”
—Amanda Lee Smith
As a result, Simone has remained a consistent fixture in the brand’s storytelling, and has been supported throughout her journey in the following years.
3. Choose influencers who align with your purpose
When track and field Olympian Allyson Felix became a mother, her pre-existing brand partnerships were trimmed down dramatically. It was clear to her that when female athletes become moms, brands change their tune, and athletes risk pay cuts. Athleta flipped the script entirely for Allyson when they approached her: they wanted to support her on a holistic level. She wasn’t just an athlete to them—she was a mother and an activist, too.
How did they go the extra mile to embrace all parts of her? Their design team would spend the whole day with Allyson, seeing how she *actually* went about her daily life and ensuring their collections and messaging reflect who she is and all the roles she plays in her life. More than three years after partnering with Allyson, they’ve launched five collections together and even invested in her shoe brand, Saysh. They committed to a partnership on her terms, not theirs—and they chose an aligned influencer that truly reflected their mission around igniting potential in women and girls.
“When we focus on sales, we suck. When we focus on purpose, we win. I truly believe that. Driving sales is important, of course, you need to be growing, but that said, I believe that when you focus on your purpose, the sales are an outcome of the good work you are doing to stay true to your values and purpose, to do the right thing.”
—Michelle Lazar
