The Campaign

The team symbol of the “star” served as an inspiration, and both uniforms depict the “dazzling stars in the night sky”. They are designed so that multiple shirts create a single giant pattern, which emerges when spectators wearing the uniforms fill up the stands of the stadium. Yokohama Star Night's uniform uses a contrasting shade of blue, which represents “the star-spangled sky of Yokohama”. It has a standard contour that can be worn by men and women of all ages. Yokohama Girls Night's uniform was designed differently from the Star Night uniform. It has an A-line that widens from the shoulder to the bottom, creating a more feminine silhouette. The aim for using the colorful combination of white and light blue dots is to display the attractive and appealing qualities of women. Also, both uniforms use a dot motif, which shows consistency with the year’s fashion branding image.

Creative Execution

The Yokohama Star Night and Yokohama Girls Night have become one of Yokohama’s biggest annual summer events since it started in 2012, which was when the franchise was newly established. Its concept is “an event where every person can dazzle like the stars and enliven the spirit of the team as well as the town”, and the purpose is to serve as a moment of excitement through bringing together the town of Yokohama and the team. Event scale: Close to a full capacity of 30,000 people filled Yokohama Stadium for three days. The number of visitors was approximately 90,000 people. Live viewing was held at 3 other venues apart from the stadium, where a total of more than 10,000 people gathered and tickets were sold out. This event distributed special event uniforms for female visitors to wear during the event, while other programs were also planned.

The stadium occupancy for the first Star Night in 2012 was around 73%, however it reached over 90% since the distribution of uniforms that began in 2013. Currently it is close to 100% every year. Additionally, tickets are almost immediately sold out after being placed on sale, and even members of the fan club struggle to get seats unless they have gold membership, making it an extremely popular event. The stadium occupancy of the Girls Festival was around 90% for the first year, however tickets were sold out for 2018 and it reached near 100%, making it also a highly successful event. The stadium occupancy throughout the year is over 1.93 million, which is a 175% increase since the team was established in 2012. While it is not solely due to the result of these events, the campaign has definitely served as a contribution for this boost in spectator figures.

These are special uniforms used for the “Yokohama Star Night 2018” and “Yokohama Girls Festival 2018”, which are special events each held once a year by “Yokohama DeNA Baystars”, a professional baseball team based in Yokohama. The items were developed for the purpose of adding an element of excitement for sports events, therefore we believe they fit in the Entertainment Category.

The short-term objective of this campaign is to attract customers for the event, while the long-term goal is to acquire new fans through free distribution of the uniforms. Nearly 300 million Yen was spent for the events to hand out uniforms, which could also be used permanently, to around 90,000 people. This figure is the maximum capacity of the stadium for 3 days. This service of handing out free uniforms not only served as an appealing promotion for stadium spectators, but it also helped to make people visit the stadium more casually by wearing the uniform on regular match days as well. The annually distributed uniforms can become a collector’s item, which will make people visit the following year to get the new uniform.