Haleon Moves Wellness Off The Shelf And Into Soccer’s Pregame Tunnel Walk Ritual

Tunnel walks are no longer just for luxury fashion brands and sneaker deals. As sports culture increasingly merges with style, celebrity, and personal branding, Haleon is using the pregame arrival ritual to reposition everyday wellness products as part of how people prepare, perform, and present themselves. Through their For the Assist campaign, the company is tying products like Advil, Sensodyne, and Tums to the broader emotional energy surrounding game-day readiness. The move highlights how consumer health brands are increasingly looking beyond traditional functional messaging in search of more culturally resonant territory.

Karina Ong, Vice President of Marketing at Haleon US, helped shape the strategy behind the campaign. Across more than two decades in global brand management roles at Unilever, Kraft Heinz, and Johnson & Johnson, Ong has spent much of her career navigating the challenge of making mass-market consumer products feel culturally relevant across large and complex organizations. That experience informed Haleon’s approach to the U.S. Soccer partnership, which reframes elite pregame rituals as a broader metaphor for everyday support.

"Both on and off court you need to be prepared, and the tunnel walk embodies that preparation. That’s why we thought it would be a great moment to bring that idea to life," says Ong. The ritual has evolved into a highly visible moment tied to confidence, mindset, and personal routine, making it a natural fit for brands centered around everyday wellness. Ong’s team saw an opportunity to connect products to the broader rhythms surrounding game day, from getting ready beforehand to recovery afterward, instead of limiting the messaging to isolated health problems. "The tunnel walk has now been glamorized, and it's relevant both for the sport as well as for our consumers' health journeys," she notes.

Authenticity gets the assist

Standing out around the tunnel walk also meant avoiding the kind of interchangeable athlete sponsorships that increasingly flood sports marketing. As more brands pile into soccer culture ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, audiences have become quicker to spot partnerships that feel transactional or disconnected from the products themselves. Ong approached the campaign with a heavy emphasis on credibility, focusing on athletes whose personal routines and on-field roles naturally aligned with Haleon’s broader messaging around support and readiness. "Tyler Adams and Crystal Dunn have been critical to the success of U.S. Soccer, for both the men's and women's teams," she notes. "When we spoke to them, they really resonated with what we stood for. Authenticity is key, and they also believe in the importance of the assist as part of getting that goal."

Soccer’s rise in the U.S. since the 1996 Olympics has created an environment where history and nuance matter to fans. To physically represent the campaign, Haleon dropped a nostalgia-heavy designer cleat bag that taps right into late‑1990s aesthetics, complete with quilt‑style paneling and the oversized tongue flap players remember folding over their laces. Instead of pushing cheap, generic stadium merch, the team invested in a thoughtful object intended to create a halo effect for the master brand. "Every partner we've worked with has a strong inclination towards soccer. Even Andrea Bergart, who designed our bags, had a childhood anchored around soccer," Ong notes. "When she designed the cleat bag, she thought about the cleats she used to wear and designed from that inspiration."

Four brands, one ritual

Drawing on her resource-allocation background, Ong and her team mapped four different brands to specific moments in the day. Sensodyne anchors the morning routine, Advil addresses pain that crops up during the day, Centrum supports all‑day health, and Tums is a flexible option whenever discomfort appears. That structure turned a cluster of functional products into a single daily readiness story, helping the company reach the soccer community in the places they already pay attention to. "The brands we chose are all iconic brands that we believe will really resonate. They are an embodiment of the before, during, and after‑game ritual," she explains. "We thought through the right combination of brands with the right purpose and intent."

Jamming four distinct brands, their marketing teams, and legal approvals into a single sports partnership requires ruthless prioritization. In a landscape where many marketing leaders face pressure to focus on tangible outcomes rather than activity, Ong anchored the massive effort in a small set of hard metrics. At the same time, the team had to make pragmatic decisions about scope as they worked toward a launch visible across multiple channels, including large‑scale outdoor campaigns and other live‑sports environments. "Penetration is a very critical KPI in measuring success, which for us means being able to increase penetration with the activation we do," she notes. "There is also a second KPI related to brand equity and the halo impact of the partnership."

Built to go bigger

Executing a campaign that blends sports culture, fashion, retail, wellness, and multiple global brands required far more coordination than a typical sponsorship rollout. Ong says the internal excitement surrounding the concept quickly pushed the campaign beyond a standard endorsement deal and into a much larger conversation about how consumer health brands could show up differently around sports fandom. "The hardest part was asking, 'How big can we make this?' When we brought U.S. Soccer to all our partners, everyone was super excited and we could definitely see a vision and a future. It was just a matter of what we could get done in a short span of time. We had all hands on deck to make things happen."

That experience ultimately reinforced Ong’s broader philosophy for managing large-scale brand collaborations: start with the biggest possible vision, then work backward from there. Rather than building partnerships around isolated tactics or short-term deliverables, she focuses first on whether the organizations involved genuinely share the same larger purpose and audience connection. "Look at the opportunities and how big the partnership could be, and then work your way backwards from that vision," Ong concludes. "Who are the right partners to engage with? For me, that's super critical. In our case, we decided to make it really big because we saw a strong, connected purpose between U.S. Soccer and ourselves. That really fit well."