How do you sell comfort to a culture that treats discomfort as the normal price of ambition?
Brand platform and positioning built from the ground up for a footwear brand strong on reason but with no emotional core.
BRAND
Ecco
TYPE
Brand & communication strategy
YEAR
2023
CATEGORY
Footwear
SCOPE
Brand platform & repositioning
AGENCY
Leo Burnett
Challenge
A brand strong on reason, with no reason to be loved.
Ecco owns strong rational equity — fit, real leather, “on your feet all day.” A loyal segment buys it precisely for that.
But across its market, Ecco had no formed positioning and no emotional core — only the rational story. So it couldn't grow past that loyal core: a brand people buy, but don't love.
The brief: build the platform that didn't exist yet.
Develop Ecco's positioning, mission and emotional territory from the ground up — the brand had none.
The obvious move was to add warmth on top of comfort, the way every shoe brand does. But that was the trap: in a culture that treats comfort as weakness, simply making comfort feel nice doesn't work. The brand needed a reason for comfort to matter — not a softer way to sell it.
The reframe
You cannot sell comfort as a feature to people who don't believe they're entitled to it.
Comfort wasn't a product problem. It was a permission problem.
The audience — 25–40, self-sufficient, urban — lives by one rule: happiness has to be earned. Discomfort is just the habitat. The “comfort zone” is where losers stay.
So the job was never “prove the comfort.” It was “give comfort back its legitimacy.” The enemy here isn't a competitor — it's the achievement culture that made comfort feel like weakness.
The insight
“People have grown used to discomfort — and learned to call it normal.”
Achievement culture turned fighting the comfort zone into the price of being taken seriously — and made comfort itself feel like a weakness. That's the cultural pain the platform had to resolve: not a gap in the product, but a permission the audience had stopped giving themselves.
The territory wasn't guessed — it was built. It came out of a two-day cross-functional workshop with Ecco's leadership, marketing and sales teams, run on the Brand Purpose pyramid method. Going in, I'd built the analytical foundation: the category and trend audit, the competitor audit, and a detailed portrait of the strategic audience. The exhibits below are rebuilt from the working decks — translated and de-branded.
Eleven territories were developed against one shared logic, then clustered into a single map. The strategy resolved to one — the platform carried forward as the recommended direction:
“Living in joy, not in endurance — that is what's actually natural.”
Sharpest enemy
The normalisation of endurance as a habitat — a tension everyone in the audience feels but never names.
Most ownable
The brand's craft expertise is the literal proof that suffering is optional. No competitor can borrow it.
Big enough
It scales from manifesto to product story to seasonal campaign without thinning out.
The recommended concept, as worked
The platform, taken all the way to a finished concept.
The two artefacts below are the recommended territory as it was actually worked — the concept write-up and its Brand Purpose pyramid.
Eleven territories, clustered into a single landscape.
Once all concepts were written, they were mapped — clustered by the underlying meaning each one ran on. The map is how the eleven became a decision: five territories of thought, and within them the one carried forward.
Exhibit GSemantic mapping — all concepts
Three of the eleven, up close
The summary statement is the discipline test: if a territory can't survive being said in a single sentence, it isn't a platform. The recommended one, held up against two alternatives.
Territory D — recommended
“Living in joy, not in endurance — that's what's natural.”
Carried forward →
Enemy
Discomfort, normalised as the habitat you must adapt to.
Territory A — alternative
“Shoes you actually want to walk in.”
Enemy
The ideology of endless self-overcoming and achievement.
Territory F — alternative
“Give the comfort zone its good name back.”
Enemy
The stigma that brands the comfort zone a place for losers.
The final result
From the carried-forward concept, the full brand platform was built.
The recommended territory — “Living in joy, not in endurance” — was developed into Ecco's full positioning platform on the framework below: from competitive landscape and points of parity/difference up to the single brand idea. This was Ecco's first formed positioning in the CIS market. The populated pyramid and the platform detail are under NDA; what's shown here is the structure the work was built on.
Exhibit HBrand pyramid — the framework (populated version under NDA)
My role & zone of responsibility
Where I owned the work — and where I worked with the team.
Analytical foundation — owned
Built the entire pre-workshop base solo: the 360° category & trend audit; the competitor audit decoding each player's positioning, communication, design and tone of voice; and the audience work — selecting the strategic target audience and writing its detailed portrait, including pains, motivations and category behaviour.
Strategic audience definition — owned
Defined who the platform had to be built for: the 25–40 self-sufficient urban segment, and surfaced the governing tension — happiness must be earned, discomfort is the habitat, the comfort zone is for losers — that the whole reframe later turned on.
Client-facing — owned
Presented the category and competitor analysis directly to Ecco's leadership, marketing and sales stakeholders inside the two-day workshop, framing the strategic problem the platform had to solve.
Insight platforms — co-developed
Synthesised the raw observations and facts from the cross-functional sessions into clustered insight platforms, and shaped them toward positioning concepts — working within the agency team under the strategic director.
From set to recommendation — strategic judgement
Assessed the full territory landscape against enemy sharpness, ownability and scale to arrive at the recommended platform — the strategist's call on which direction Ecco should carry forward.
