Featured: Sports Business Journal
Shannon Langrand: Women’s sports isn’t a marketing test — it’s a brand one
Ideas
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Sponsorship dollars are the surface. Underneath, women’s sports is testing whether brands were built to connect with women, or only to sell to them.
This article was first featured in Sports Business Journal.
The WNBA numbers this season are impossible to ignore. Record viewership. Sponsorship deals that didn’t exist three years ago. WNBA sponsorship alone grew 45% year over year, from $72.3 million to $105 million. The momentum is real, and it is also the least interesting thing happening right now.
What women’s sports is doing is more significant: It’s dismantling how brands have organized themselves around women for 20 years. That structure isn’t holding.
For the better part of two decades, most consumer brands operated on a fragmented view of women. The athlete. The professional. The caregiver. The wellness seeker. The sports fan. Separate product lines. Separate campaigns. Separate teams inside the same company, rarely in conversation with each other. The assumption sat deeper than any campaign brief. It shaped product architecture, org design and what got measured. Women, the model said, could be reliably sorted into categories that stayed put.
Women’s sports is proving that assumption wrong in real time
The athletes driving this growth don’t stay in a single lane. They move fluidly between conversations about performance, compensation, ownership, mental health, ambition and money. And their audiences are engaging with all of it as one story. A 2025 Future of Fandom survey by The GIST and Barbarian found that “79% of women equally value game highlights and personal stories, seeing athletes as 360-degree icons.” Nobody assigned those topics to them. They built that conversation themselves.
The complexity isn’t a complication. It’s the product.
For years, the conventional wisdom was that authenticity was a tactic — something you specified in a campaign brief as a tone of voice. Women’s sports is exposing that framework as too shallow to hold.
These athletes aren’t performing authenticity. They’re demonstrating it, publicly, consistently, at a scale most brand campaigns never reach. They are complex and contradictory and ambitious and vulnerable, sometimes within the same week. Their audiences aren’t tolerating that complexity; they’re showing up because of it. Women’s sports fans are among the most discerning consumers in any category right now, and they got there by watching athletes refuse to be reduced.
That expectation carries. It moves from the field into every other brand relationship in their lives. A brand that shows up fragmented in one category and coherent in another is now legible to them. They can see the difference.
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The sponsorship trap
Women’s sports isn’t a marketing channel. It’s the most-watched cultural conversation happening about how women operate in systems that weren’t built for them — about ambition, recovery, ownership, money, visibility and what gets paid for and what doesn’t.
What’s happening in women’s sports is what’s happening in women’s lives. Most organizations are approaching it as a sponsorship opportunity. The smarter ones are recognizing it as a signal.
Most brands enter the category asking how to reach this audience. The better question is what this audience’s engagement with these athletes is telling them to expect from every brand in their lives.
The difference shows. Kaiser Permanente’s partnership with the Golden State Valkyries is worth studying. It didn’t stop at a jersey deal. It integrated as the team’s official physician group, building year-round care into how the team operates day to day. What fans see isn’t a logo. They see a brand that understands what it’s entering. The strongest partnerships aren’t adjacent to the story; they become structurally relevant to it.
Brands that arrive with a “sponsorship’” brief will leave with a receipt. Brands that arrive with something genuine to say will build something that compounds.
What this asks of brand leaders
The opportunity in women’s sports isn’t reach. It’s re-education.
The athletes moved first. They stopped being single-use personas before anyone gave them permission to. The audience followed. Now brands have a choice: Keep operating on the model of women this audience has already outgrown, or let what they’re watching reshape how the brand itself is built.
The brands worth watching are the ones that understand what they’re actually watching.
Shannon Langrand
Founder, CEO
Shannon is dedicated to helping senior leaders in highly dynamic industries to innovate and solve problems in the face of change.
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Doing great work is never a solo act.
