Abstract
Athleisure has shifted from a niche performance category to an everyday uniform that fuses comfort, capability, and identity. For many women, leggings, sports bras, and hybrid trainers are not merely functional garments but symbolic resources used to perform, negotiate, and communicate selfhood across multiple contexts, from gym floors to offices and lecture halls. This paper develops the concept of marketing as identity infrastructure in the athleisure category, examining how marketing strategies both influence and interact with evolving female consumer behaviour.
Drawing on a qualitative, interpretivist study with 14 women aged 20–35, we conduct a reflexive thematic analysis of in-depth online interviews. We focus on Theme 3 (“Marketing Integration”), which explores how athleisure marketing—including creative direction, casting, influencer collaborations, and social media content—operates through a dualistic mechanism: it can empower through inclusive representation and credible aspiration, or it can alienate through unrealistic beauty standards, social pressure, and exclusionary messaging.
Our interpretive framework integrates the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) with self and extended-self perspectives (Belk, 1988; 2013), self-congruity and identity signalling (Sirgy, 1982; Escalas & Bettman, 2005), brand authenticity (Beverland, 2005; Morhart et al., 2015), and brand community (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001; McAlexander et al., 2002; Schau et al., 2009). We show how marketing interventions shape behavioural, normative, and control beliefs while simultaneously operating on identity-relevant processes such as self-congruity, self-efficacy, and belonging.
Conceptually, we theorise athleisure marketing as identity infrastructure that scaffolds who is seen as visible, capable, and “allowed” to be aspirational. Managerially, we propose a set of practices for achieving credible aspiration without erasure or exclusion, spanning representation governance, influencer integrity, community orchestration, and measurement beyond short-term return on ad spend. We conclude that brands that effectively align product truth, identity work, and community design are best positioned to build trust, loyalty, and advocacy among female consumers in the athleisure market.