Superhuman powers

Ochsner Sport is celebrating its 50th birthday with a year of records. With "record-breaking offers and promotions", customers will always have something to celebrate in 2011. For the matching campaign, the Swiss ski stars of the Ochsner Sport Racing Team show that Ochsner Sport is not the only one giving its all in the anniversary year. The campaign by Wirz includes a variety of measures from advertisements and brochures to POS and TV commercials. The protagonists Carlo Janka, Daniel Albrecht and Didier Défago did not stand on every podium in the last winter season. However, the team is fully convincing in the campaign. To this end, Wirz has transposed the previously used idea of "fighting against oneself" into a new dimension. "The sporting experience was dramatized to the extreme," explains CD Thomas Kurzmeyer. The ski stars sponsored by Ochsner can be seen using completely new, but "guaranteed effective" training methods.

Year of records

"Associating the ski stars with Ochsner Sport in a new way, even detached from skiing, is a step in a new direction and also a great benefit for the campaign, as our athletes perfectly embody the anniversary motto," says Patrice Dupasqier, CEO of Dosenbach-Ochsner. For the athletes themselves, the new campaign offers a unique platform, as they will be present in Ochsner sports communication throughout the year. The first Ochsner TV commercials to be broadcast throughout Switzerland were filmed in Mallorca this winter. A crane was brought in especially for the scene where Albrecht had to carry his colleague Janka up a mountain in a rucksack. But Albrecht carried Janka, who weighed 95 kilos, without any problems, even without this aid. Nobody from Wirz's creative team wanted to reveal how the record-breaking training scene with the water skiing came about. Andreas Panzeri

History

Since the opening of the first Ochsner Sport store in 1961, founder Max Ochsner has had the same idea as all passionate athletes: to win victory after victory and one day be at the top! In the first three decades, the company gained respect in the market with six new sales outlets, but Ochsner Sport wanted more. The merger with Dosenbach and Deichmann followed in the nineties. Today, Dosenbach-Ochsner AG is part of the Deichmann Group, headquartered in Essen (Germany). They are the largest shoe retailer in both Germany and Europe. Internationally, the Deichmann Group sold around 152 million pairs of shoes in 19 European countries and the USA in 2010. At the end of 2010, the Group operated 2939 stores worldwide.

Ochsner Sport is the largest sporting goods retailer in Switzerland with over 90 specialist stores. Around 1500 trained sporting goods sales staff "give their all to provide personal, expert advice and first-class service". Five new openings are already planned for 2011 in all parts of Switzerland.