STIHL Timbersports

Background
STIHL Timbersports is the world’s oldest extreme sport with its heritage in Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. The sport is an international competition series within athletic tree felling which demands strength, technique and courage. The sport is still relatively small on the Swedish market but is advancing steadily. The interest in, and awareness of, the sport is growing continuously and there is a true fanbase following the competitions.

The Challenge
How can we create attention in Swedish and Nordic media around a sport which is still relatively unknown in Sweden and Scandinavia? Being a sport owned by the commercial brand STIHL can also be challenging in contacts with independent media.

The solution
We increased the awareness among media by providing journalists with relevant and thorough background material. We identified greater news-value related to championships; Nordic Championship, World Championship and Champions Trophy. The sport is visually spectacular and thrilling to watch. We managed to identify communicative challenges and meet them with solutions which have created much publicity for a small sport in terms of active athletes. We worked with both local and national media and identified key messages for relevant contexts which proved to be very successful. Social media has of course been utilized to reach relevant target groups. We also highlighted Ferry Svan, a young promising Swedish athlete with an interesting back story, which was a real privilege in terms of media value.