Why Tylenol is heading into women’s soccer

Athletes are prone to injury, and women’s soccer players are no exception. So it only makes sense that, in addition to having official hydration and retail sponsors, the NWSL has an official pain reliever, too.

This spring, Tylenol inked a multi-year partnership with the league, followed by a deal with its New York and New Jersey team, Gotham FC, that was announced this summer. Both sponsorships are part of a relatively new effort from Tylenol to get more involved in the sports space, and the push so far has hinged almost entirely on the women’s game.

“As we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do to connect with our consumers and support women’s sports, it just was really clear for us [that] sports and pain relief go very well together,” Jen Gow, US head of pain at Tylenol’s parent company, Kenvue, told Marketing Brew. “Greatness hurts, and we want to support great athletes.”

While the brand is still in the midst of its first season with the NWSL, Gow said the league is already exposing Tylenol to new audiences, indicating early success and making the brand’s marketers consider the potential for a long-term investment in women’s soccer.

First touch

Gow said the Tylenol team first got interested in sports sponsorships around the time of the Olympics, even though the brand has not yet been involved in any partnerships at the Olympic level.

“We celebrate gold, and we also celebrate bronze and silver, but there’s such a huge opportunity to celebrate just the effort and the grind that athletes go through throughout their careers,” she said. “We started looking at, ‘How can we support athletes who have been sidelined?’”

To start testing the waters, Tylenol partnered with the Women’s Sports Foundation in 2023, setting up a grant to help injured athletes with burdens like medical bills while they recover. When it came time to engage with sports more deeply, the growing fandom around women’s soccer and the roster of national and international superstars in the game made the NWSL seem like a “super obvious choice,” Gow said. The multi-year partnership was officially announced in May, but Tylenol really kicked off the partnership in earnest around the time of the league’s Rivalry Weekend last month.

Midfield

The week prior to Rivalry Weekend, Tylenol debuted as the official pain reliever of Gotham FC, and Gow said the team-level partnership allowed the brand to engage with NWSL fans in person for the first time.

“We were able to truly be there, versus it just being a media activation the consumers see,” she said. “Fans see so many media activations; we wanted to make sure that we took it one step further.”

During Gotham’s Rivalry Weekend game against the Washington Spirit, Tylenol passed out product samples and branded merch like foam fingers, and at the team’s pregame Fan Fest, the brand set up a ball pit that attendees could jump into as they headed a soccer ball into a net.

The broader partnership includes in-venue branding and content assets, including the presenting sponsorship of Gotham’s starting 11 social posts for each match. Tylenol is also set to serve as the presenting partner of one of Gotham’s theme night matches and a “flagship community program” starting next season, according to the brand.

For Gotham, that kind of community involvement is integral to a sponsorship, Laura Petro, the team’s VP of fan and brand experience, told us. Petro and her team also look for brands that are interested in “elevating our players,” she said. Tylenol hasn’t announced any player deals so far.

In a sign both of healthy brand interest in women’s soccer and Gotham’s growing sponsorship roster, Petro said her team is in a position to turn down potential partners if their interests don’t necessarily align with that of the team’s.

“There’s been a real narrative shift and a material change, even in the last few years, about how brands are really looking at these sponsorships, ultimately, in the same way they’re looking at sponsorships of men’s sports,” Petro said. “Brands are seeing the impact. They wouldn’t be investing the money that they’re investing if they weren’t getting that ROI.”

In the box

As is the case with many major sports sponsorships, Gow said she’s primarily looking for broad reach and engagement, as well as increasing equity among women’s soccer fans. Tylenol has already done some media buys in men’s sports, according to Gow, but she’s getting the necessary reach she’s looking for solely through the women’s soccer sponsorships, especially among younger consumers who may not have been previously exposed to the brand’s marketing, she said.

“It’s unduplicated reach,” she said. “We could have an ad during an NFL playoff game, [but] they’re very different consumers, and it’s awesome to be able to support both, but the NWSL provides a really rich reach. It’s a meaningful reach to a new consumer, which is exactly what we’re looking for.”

Even with the men’s World Cup in North America fast approaching, Gow said Tylenol is staying focused on the women’s game for the foreseeable future.

“I can’t say for certain that it’s a forever thing and we’re going to end up sponsoring every single team forever, but based on the success that we have, I can’t see us wanting to step back,” she said.