How Pickleball Hijacked a Brand Strategy Meeting
It started with a diagram. A consultant had dropped in to help a fizzy beverage startup “refine its cultural relevance,” and up came the Venn diagram: Youth Culture, Health Consciousness, Non-Alcoholic Rituals. Right in the overlapping centre? Pickleball.
Yes, pickleball. A glorified mashup of table tennis and regret. The game had apparently captured the zeitgeist. Less aggressive than tennis, more social than running a half-marathon, and reportedly popular among "creatives re-embracing leisure." Naturally, a room full of marketing people began pitching campaigns involving sweatbands, reusable drink bottles, and grainy TikTok footage of 32-year-olds playing doubles in slow motion.
I’m not here to dunk on pickleball. The game is fine. What fascinated me was how a niche sport became an ecosystem for brand storytelling. That’s the kicker in modern marketing—we borrow someone else’s thing (in this case, pickleball) and wrap it around our own narrative. It’s branding as cultural hitchhiking. And no, it doesn’t always feel natural.
The smarter brand play is to first ask: why *this* thing, now? Dig into what people are actually responding to. Maybe it’s not the sport, but the restorative break it represents. Maybe it’s not non-alcoholic, but ritualistic. Maybe, just maybe, your brand doesn’t need to show up in the middle of the court at all. Sometimes relevance isn’t about entering the scene, it’s about capturing the mood outside it.
Yes, pickleball. A glorified mashup of table tennis and regret. The game had apparently captured the zeitgeist. Less aggressive than tennis, more social than running a half-marathon, and reportedly popular among "creatives re-embracing leisure." Naturally, a room full of marketing people began pitching campaigns involving sweatbands, reusable drink bottles, and grainy TikTok footage of 32-year-olds playing doubles in slow motion.
I’m not here to dunk on pickleball. The game is fine. What fascinated me was how a niche sport became an ecosystem for brand storytelling. That’s the kicker in modern marketing—we borrow someone else’s thing (in this case, pickleball) and wrap it around our own narrative. It’s branding as cultural hitchhiking. And no, it doesn’t always feel natural.
The smarter brand play is to first ask: why *this* thing, now? Dig into what people are actually responding to. Maybe it’s not the sport, but the restorative break it represents. Maybe it’s not non-alcoholic, but ritualistic. Maybe, just maybe, your brand doesn’t need to show up in the middle of the court at all. Sometimes relevance isn’t about entering the scene, it’s about capturing the mood outside it.