Under Armour, Inc.
Joshua O'Rourke
MBA-560
Milestone One
Branding and Idea Context
Defining Features
Under Armour is a sporting goods and fitness gear company that is headquartered in
Baltimore, Maryland. Its mission is “to make all athletes better through passion, design and the
relentless pursuit of innovation” (About Under Armour, 2019). The brand is best known for its
compression clothing, but has since grown to now have a wide variety of products. Products such
as shoes for multiple sports, athletic tops, athletic bottoms, socks, and underwear.
The sports in question where Under Armour has invested the most in to define it brand
would have to be football and basketball, where their logo and constantly be seen by either the
teams or players they sponsor. Players like Steph Curry, or teams like the University of
Maryland, along with others often get national exposure and therefore allows Under Armour a
platform on which to promote its products. Since the debut of Under Armour’s latest product,
their running shoe the HOVR Infinite, the company has since moved into the running market.
Already a quality product, Under Armour’s next step should be to create a shoe that
makes sport watches obsolete to runners. This next shoe will allow for runners to have all the
same stats that they get currently from the HOVR Infinite; distance, time, pace, and elevation
change; but it would add running stats that are currently only available in sports watches. Stats
like ground contact time, cadence, vertical oscillation, vertical ratio, and stride length could be
added into this new product, and the HOVR Infinite 2.0 would be the next generation of running
shoe.
Fit of New Products
Under Armour’s latest products tend to fit the core of the company’s mission. There latest
Running shoe, HOVR Infinite, won the 2019 Runner’s World “Recommended” Award, the first
1
time any of the company’s running shoes has received an honor. The product featured the
innovative HOVR foam and variety of wild, colorful designs. Combined with the performance
award, this new product hits on all three points of Under Armour’s mission; better athletes,
design, and innovation.
The fit for the new HOVR Infinite 2.0 would be a better fit than its predecessor.
Innovation is what the company is known for, and putting a sports watch into a running shoe has
never been done before. Under Armour was created thanks to a blue ocean, as a result, all
products that the company has made have attempted to follow a similar path (Furgurson, 2018).
Rather than creating a product that is similar to others in the market, create a product that does
not exist in the market. This is another opportunity at a blue ocean for Under Armour as
everyone has some type of Bluetooth connect shoe, but no one is going as far as putting all the
features of running metrics in a shoe. Under Armour would be the first and the stats collected
from the runners would actually fulfill the mission of the company as these stats will tell runners
if they are improving, or if they need to fix their stride, resulting in better athletes.
