JD Sports strategy broke Christmas

Welcome to Behind the Brand. Every week, I talk to the thinkers and makers behind the world’s most interesting brands and break down the strategies behind them.

For our first episode, I sat down with Marta Gama, Head of Campaign & Media Planning at JD Sports. A brand that didn’t just challenge Christmas conventions, it totally reinvented them. It was a great discussion where we unpacked the strategy behind their ‘Forever Forward’ platform, the cultural and consumer signals that shaped it, and their their rule-breaking holiday campaign.

So grab a coffee, settle in, and enjoy.

(PS moving forward all epsidoes of ‘Behind the Brand’ will drop at 9AM GMT Sunday)

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A paradoxical insight

Before building their new brand platform, JD Sports did what all great brands do. and all great brand strategy work, demand. They stepped out of the boardroom, immersed themselves in culture, and dug deep into the lives of their target audience. What they found became the strategic unlock that would reshape the entire direction of the brand.

As Marta explained, understanding what their 16–24 core audience had lived through, and how those experiences shaped their behaviour, was absolutely pivotal. This wasn’t surface-level insight. It was cultural truth.

Marta described Gen Z as a generation forged in a paradox. They grew up inside a moment where nothing was happening, yet everything was happening. COVID created a sense of suspended reality: life paused, ambitions deferred, milestones erased. But simultaneously, a new digital world accelerated around them.

This experience created both urgency and a sense of “lost time.” It fuelled a generation that is hyper-proactive, self-starting, and refuses to wait for permission. As Marta put it:

“It’s like, maybe I’m not going to uni, I’m just going to open my own business… It’s their spirit, the way that the self-expression on this new generation works.”

At the centre of all this is their digital life, particularly TikTok and mobile, platforms that didn’t just entertain them but became their social life, their community, and their stage. A place where they could craft identity, build influence, and express themselves fearlessly. As Marta explained“During COVID… all those social media accounts, TikTok, all that, increased… it was their only channel that they were able to express themselves. So that’s why social plays a very important role for JD.”

This insight became the foundation of the Forever Forward brand strategy:

After COVID may have supercharged the younger generations desire for success however, at JD we believe the passion and drive of young people has always been there. We’ve seen it over the course of the past 40 years, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

For a retailer repositioning itself like a challenger brand, this cultural truth was essential. And it shaped every decision that followed.

Finding a way Forward

From this insight, a clearer and more purposeful brand direction emerged. Forever Forward wasn’t conceived as a slogan, it was a declaration of JD’s role in modern youth culture. The brand began to shift its self-perception: less as a traditional retailer, more as a platform. A cultural amplifier. A place where young people could find visibility, validation, and momentum. The brand strategy was disarmingly simple:

Push a younger generation forever forward.

In other words, create space for young people to be fully themselves & make JD the brand that helps them be seen. This shift was anchored in a deeper truth about JD Sports: its credibility doesn’t come from its product alone, but from its behaviour. From the communities it invests in. From who it elevates, who it collaborates with, and how it shows up in real lives, not from the trainers on the shelf. Even during the biggest commercial moments, the gravitational pull has moved away from solely focusing on glossy, celebrity-led campaigns and now positions the young creators who are genuinely shaping culture, alongside a-list stars. This shift says loud and clear: JD Sports proactively give youth a platform to be seen and to be heard.

As Marta put it, why solely pour energy into chasing a superstar when a kid posting three tracks on TikTok is capturing the raw cultural energy of a generation? Elevating those emerging voices, giving them space, visibility, opportunity, and momentum, is what truly propels youth culture forward.

And that is the heartbeat of Forever Forward. JD earns its relevance not by selling to young people, but by standing with them. By offering tools, access, and platforms to the next generation. By championing their talent, not just promoting its own products. In doing so, JD transforms from a retail brand into a cultural partner…one that helps young people move, grow, and quite literally move forward.

Breaking the rules of Christmas

The most recent Christmas campaign is Forever Forward brought to life at full scale: youth-first, mobile-native, globally coherent yet locally fluent. And crucially, it looks nothing like a traditional Christmas ad.

Marta is unambiguous on this point. This wasn’t a festive one-off or a seasonal stunt; it was a brand statement delivered at the moment of maximum cultural attention. “This was not about Christmas,” she told me. “It was simply the best moment to launch it.”. The campaign used the holiday window not for sentimentality, but for reach, scale, and cultural cut-through. And its starting point was obvious: meet Gen Z in the place where identity is created, community is built, and culture actually happens.
Mobile.

For this audience, mobile isn’t a device; it’s home. It’s where they film, edit, interact, experiment, and express themselves. It’s the stage where their real lives unfold. So JD didn’t try to pull them into a polished brand world. Instead, it built the campaign inside their world.

“It was pretty clear… that the mobile is their ecosystem. They live through that. They express themselves through that. So it was kind of an easy choice. It was just how bold we wanted to be.” Marta Gama

That insight unlocked the core creative idea: the phone as the modern stage for youth self-expression. Instead of forcing a brand narrative onto young people, JD flipped the model. The campaign asked a simple, open-ended question “Where are you going?” ….and then handed 286 phones to young creators to answer it in their own words, through their own lens.

Established names like Cole Palmer and Jade from Little Mix appeared, but crucially, they sat alongside emerging, hyper-local talent. The kids shaping culture from bedrooms, stairwells, side streets, football cages, and studio corners. The brief was intentionally unpolished and liberating: go home, go into your communities, and make something locally true. The creators embraced it precisely because it handed them authorship, agency, and control. It wasn’t a brand borrowing relevance; it was a brand giving it back.

To ignite the launch, JD staged a pop-up party in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, headlined by DJ Josh Baker. For one night only, a fake phone shop…“Phones-4-Youse” …transformed into a rave. Hundreds of phones lined the walls, looping the Christmas film, while Baker played to a packed crowd squeezed between display counters and faux repair desks. It was part retail installation, part underground club night, and entirely consistent with the Forever Forward ethos: youth culture on its own terms, in its own spaces, powered by its own creativity.

The Impact

I’ve long argued that fame is one the strongest drivers of growth. But here’s the inconvenient truth: fame isn’t easy. It’s uncomfortable. It requires you to step into the light and accept the full spectrum of reaction…the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some people will love your brand for it; some won’t. But the most important point is simple: being famous beats being forgettable.

Marta is refreshingly honest about this too. How the impact has been both positive and negative which, in fame terms, is exactly the point.

On the positive side, the campaign has delivered extraordinary reach and engagement, especially on YouTube. “The YouTube AV is reaching incredible numbers,” Marta told me. The online film is even outperforming John Lewis, the long-standing benchmark for Christmas advertising.

But she’s equally clear that the reaction hasn’t been universally glowing, and that this is not a failure. It’s the expected cost of cultural visibility. When you step into the arena, not everyone claps. And that’s precisely how you know you’re playing at the right scale.

“There are a lot of comments that are not positive, as usual…but it’s balanced – and the positive is very on-strategy. Most of the comments are so powerful, are really good, very positive, very in line with what we wanted to deliver. Like, ‘Oh, you guys really understand the generation. You guys really are supporting youth guys,’ which at the end of the day, is what you’re going for, right?” Marta Gama

Learnings

To wrap up, I’ve distilled four key learnings from Marta’s brilliant case study, that all challenger can learn from.

1. There are always new paths to growth
   We all know the rules of marketing science. But challenger brands, especially those outspent and out-known, sometimes need to pull different levers. JD is proof of this: they focused on community, loyalty, and frequency and its paying off.

2. Actions matter more than words
   In an era of low trust and high purpose-washing fatigue, brands can’t just say the right thing. They have to do it. JD followed the campaign with meaningful behaviour, giving young people a platform, visibility, and a sense of community. That’s what builds loyalty.

3. Speak alongside your audience, not from above
   Too many brands talk down to people. This campaign did the opposite. It spoke at eye level — collaborating with young creators rather than broadcasting at them. The difference is enormous.

4. Culture moments, not just codes
   There’s no shortage of “cultural experts” online, but many miss the basics: culture is made in moments. And few moments are bigger than Christmas. The genius here is the vrand stepped into that moment, broke every established code, and created something both distinctive and famous.

What did you think of this format? Is there a a brand you’d like me to deep dive into? Let me know in the comments below…