A leap into a new chapter
On 5 February 2014 Lacoste introduced "Life is a beautiful sport", a global brand platform developed with BETC Paris that reset the Maison's positioning after almost a decade of perceived ageing in its core markets. The launch film, titled "The Big Leap", showed a young man running across a series of urban surfaces and finally jumping from one rooftop to another in a single elongated leap, framed as a romantic decision rather than as a stunt. The platform launched in France first, with rolling international deployment through the spring and summer of 2014, and replaced the previous "Unconventional Chic" signature that had carried the brand since 2011.
The strategic context for the relaunch was direct. By the early 2010s Lacoste had occupied a position between sportswear and fashion that had begun to feel ambiguous to consumers, and brand-tracking data for the Maison showed weakening scores on modernity, creativity and aspiration. BETC Paris, under the strategic direction of Bertille Toledano, argued that Lacoste needed to return to its founding values rather than pursue a new fashion register, and the agency framed the relaunch as a recovery of the original Lacoste posture rather than as a reinvention. Tenacity, freedom of movement, elegance and optimism were placed at the centre of the renewed brand book, and "Life is a beautiful sport" was written to carry all four ideas in one line.
The Big Leap and the cinematic register
The launch film was directed by Seb Edwards and produced through Academy Films. Its central image was a man crossing a city skyline at dusk, breaking into a run across a residential building's rooftop and leaping in slow motion across a wide gap. The leap functioned as a metaphor for a romantic decision, with editorial cues, an empty street below, a glance toward a destination, that pointed the viewer to read the jump as a gesture of intent rather than as athletic display. The soundtrack was Henry Mancini's "Lujon", a 1961 instrumental piece whose unhurried mood gave the action the unhurried elegance the campaign needed.
The cinematography was deliberately classical. Wide architectural shots framed the city as a stage, close-ups held the man's face in moments of decision, and the camera tracked the leap in lateral motion rather than from above, giving the audience the perspective of a witness on the same rooftop. The visual register placed Lacoste alongside European cinema rather than alongside the American action codes of competing sportswear advertising. That decision was strategic. BETC's diagnosis was that Lacoste's authentic territory sat between sport and culture, and the camera language was tuned to read accordingly.
From "Unconventional Chic" to a new credo
The relaunch broke cleanly with the 2011 to 2013 "Unconventional Chic" platform that BETC had also developed. That earlier work had aimed to reposition Lacoste as a fashion brand with a streetwear edge, and it had produced striking imagery while leaving the Maison's underlying values unsettled. By 2013 the brand's leadership concluded that the Lacoste consumer wanted a coherent commitment to the Maison's heritage rather than a fashion-first reading of the crocodile. The 2014 platform translated that conclusion into language and imagery, and the new line ran across film, print and digital with a single visual signature that referenced the leap as a recurring graphic motif.
The product story sat alongside the campaign. Lacoste's Spring/Summer 2014 collection, then under creative director Felipe Oliveira Baptista, used the brand's archive as a starting point and reintroduced classic codes such as the rugby polo, the slim chino and the white tennis dress in updated cuts. The campaign therefore did not stand alone. The film, the print stills, the in-store communication and the runway collection were calibrated against each other, and the line "Life is a beautiful sport" served as the editorial signature that joined the four streams.
Commercial outcomes and a long-running framework
The platform was commercially successful and operationally efficient. In France, the 2014 campaign was associated with an 11 per cent increase in sales during the brand's advertising windows compared with the same periods in 2013, and the year overall closed with an 8 per cent volume progression. Brand-tracking data showed gains of 15 points on "makes me dream", 13 points on "creative and innovative" and 11 points on "contemporary and modern" against the comparable French study in 2013. The platform also collected a Grand Prix Effie in 2015, the most prestigious effectiveness recognition in French advertising at the time.
"Life is a beautiful sport" continued to anchor Lacoste's communication through the second half of the 2010s, with successive films, sub-platforms and product launches drawing on the same tone. The Save Our Species partnership with the IUCN in 2018, in which the crocodile temporarily gave way to ten endangered species across a limited polo collection, was framed under the broader umbrella of the 2014 work. The line eventually receded in favour of more product-driven communication in the early 2020s, before BETC Paris and Lacoste returned to it in April 2026 with a renewed global film starring Novak Djokovic at Roland-Garros. Read across more than a decade, the 2014 launch operated less as a single campaign than as a strategic framework that successive Lacoste leaderships continued to adopt.
Source: BETC Paris
