The Business War Behind the World Cup! What are the secrets of sports marketing?

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar is underway, and Chinese brands have been on the World Cup marketing stage since the World Cup in Russia. Since then, many brands have continued to deepen their marketing ties with the World Cup, with brands such as Mengniu, Wanda, and Huadi continuing to be official sponsors at this year's World Cup.

For the vast majority of brands, marketing before, during and after the World Cup is an excellent opportunity. The event has a wide audience base around the world, and a large number of brands, whether they are official partners or sponsors of the World Cup, are carrying out related marketing to stimulate and guide consumption.

Lu Shengzhen, an expert in the FMCG industry, told China Business News that brand sponsorship is about branding and visibility, and it is important to stand on these two dimensions. However, at present, consumers are becoming more and more diversified, but the cost of sports sponsorship is increasing, which exists to a certain extent, the input and output is not equal to the problem. "Therefore, the use of reasonable marketing tools to obtain additional exposure is the current direction of corporate marketing focus."

Marketing battle

Mengniu's "Born to be Strong" slogan and the on-field performance of contracted star Lionel Messi sparked a lot of buzz on China's Internet during the last World Cup. In this year's World Cup, brands are also bundling the tournament with their own brands to achieve brand exposure.

"The value of monotonous brand sponsorships that rely on screen exposure alone is diminishing. Therefore, many brands in sports marketing began to focus on the expression of creativity, with content creativity to allow users to form an active 'broken circle' communication effect." Lu Shengzhen believes that from this point of view, Mengniu's marketing in the World Cup did achieve the effect of "out of the circle", although these marketing events have a great deal of occasionality. According to GlobalData, Mengniu invested 60 million U.S. dollars (about 428 million yuan) in sponsorships for this year's World Cup.

In addition to hard-copy publicity, the reporter noted that companies are also creating soccer topics and interactive games suitable for national discussion in private communities, public numbers, small programs, microblogging and other channels to boost user activity. Among them, Mengniu's small program has set up World Cup-related game activities. Users can get "nutritional value" by completing tasks to cultivate their favorite teams, and can draw prizes including coupons, milk, official footballs and signed jerseys when they reach the corresponding quantity.

For companies that don't have sponsorship status, it doesn't mean they have nothing to do with the World Cup, as Yili has still signed a number of stars such as Benzema, Crowe, Neymar and Beckham for its sports marketing.

Song Liang, an independent dairy analyst, pointed out that dairy companies have been focusing on sports marketing as a key marketing direction and success, and has formed a set of effective communication and marketing methods with consumers, the World Cup marketing is also conducive to the dairy companies to further maintain their market advantage.

China's food industry commentator Zhu Danpeng said, for FMCG giants, sponsorship of the World Cup is a difficult thing to ride, if Coca-Cola stop sponsoring, then Pepsi will inevitably follow the trend, so in cooperation with the World Cup and even the Olympic Games, FMCG giants are not ready to turn back once on the boat.

But sports marketing expert Ji Ning believes that "companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald's and alcoholic beverages, based on years of data, relying on the event's conversion rate is very low, whether it's the Olympics or the World Cup, there's no obvious surge in performance for these FMCG giants."

In terms of alcohol companies, the World Cup has banned the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages on site at stadiums. And Budweiser, the World Cup's sole liquor sponsor, became a FIFA sponsor in 1986 (before the World Cup in Mexico). According to the New York Times, Budweiser paid $75 million (about 530 million yuan) in sponsorship fees for the World Cup. In addition, Budweiser also launched the world can and world bottle packaging, the bottle with eight team colors as the theme, so that people can see at a glance, strengthening the World Cup element attributes.

Beer is an important consumer product for sporting events, in which, driven by the 68th World Cup in the summer of 2018, China's beer sales ended the previous three consecutive years of continuous decline. The database of the China Business Industry Research Institute shows that from January to April 2018, the cumulative output of China's beer industry was 12.284 million kiloliters, an increase of 2.4% year-on-year, and sales jumped 20.8% in July of that year alone, and jumped 31% in the first seven months of that year.

Fang Gang, a beer industry expert, believes that because the World Cup is in winter, which is the off-season for beer consumption, the boost and impact on domestic beer consumption is more limited. But even so, many brewers still chose to increase marketing efforts.

According to Budweiser China, its local beer brand KINGSBURG has kicked off a beer marketing campaign in Jilin as a World Cup sponsor for the first time. Meanwhile, Tsingtao Beer will launch World Cup-related products and organize more than 200 Tsingtao Beer "match-watching parties" across the country, covering TSINGTAO1903 bars and fan restaurants in more than 40 cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Xiamen, Wuhan, Jinan and Changsha.

"If you look at the rate of return alone, some of the traditional FMCG giants of some of the marketing tools are not smart, but the problem is that if you give up, then competitors will take advantage of, rivals huge publicity effect is easy to let consumers create their own influence decline in the illusion, and thus we see a field of several giants in the market to put the competition is particularly fierce," he said. In fact, it is not that both sides are willing to do so, but do not do easy to be utilized by rivals, and thus in marketing is often followed up with each other and against the standard." Lu Shengzhen said.

Sports marketing in progress

Athletes' uniform sponsorships have always been a very important type of sponsorship at sporting events. For sports brands to compete, Ji Ning told reporters, for the team's sponsorship is very necessary, on the one hand, can drive the hot sales of peripheral products, on the other hand, can emphasize the attributes of their own sports brand. "Li Ning in the 2008 Olympic Games after trying to transition from sports to youth tide brand, thus giving up the CBA sponsorship, and Anta is on the trend, this case shows that in the field of sports brands, regardless of the size of the brand, around the tournament marketing is essential and has a high return."

The sponsorship behavior of domestic sports brands is actually to open up potential international market space. According to the results of previous years, the promotional utility of sports brands sponsoring athletes often provokes very good marketing effects. One of the most famous cases is in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Adidas through sponsorship for the Soviet athletes to provide sportswear, so that the Soviet Union set off the "Adi fever", and to this day, Adidas in Russia is still the premier sports brand.

In this year's World Cup, giants such as Nike and Adidas continue to sponsor the jerseys of many teams. Nike sponsors 13 teams, of which France was the last World Cup champion, Croatia and England were the last World Cup quarterfinals, and Brazil is the world's top-ranked men's soccer team. Next is Adidas, which sponsors seven teams, including Germany, Spain and other past World Cup title winners; Puma sponsors six teams with dark horse strength, such as Switzerland and Uruguay.

Beijing key way sports consulting company founder Zhang Qing told reporters that in recent years, many emerging sports brands will be these events as an important means of brand marketing, they tend to bet on all kinds of teams that are not favored by the public, once the team became a "dark horse" promotion, the brand's exposure will be very high, and the brand will be able to compete with Nike, Adidas, Puma, and other sports brands. The brand's exposure will be very high, and can be used against traditional giants such as Nike and Adidas, and if the team is eliminated early, the lower sponsorship fee will not cause the brand to suffer too much loss.

Meanwhile, every World Cup jersey generates huge sales for sponsors. The 2018 World Cup*** sold 14.9 million jerseys for players on the 32 teams, compared with 17.7 million for the 2014 World Cup, according to German soccer consultancy PRMarketing.

According to the latest data from Jingdong New Department Store, soccer shoes, soccer balls and soccer underwear are the hottest commodities at the moment, accounting for 40%, 28% and 25% of the total turnover of soccer-related goods, respectively. Among them, high-quality team jerseys are favored by women, with more than 40 percent of the German and Spanish national team jersey collections purchased by female consumers.

"For sports brands, the pull of soccer and basketball on jerseys and shoes is very important, so in the 32 teams in the World Cup, in addition to a small number of soccer teams using their own country's sports brands, the vast majority of soccer teams are head of the sports brand package, even the weaker Tunisia and Costa Rica, respectively, also received Kappahe and New Balance sponsorship, which is enough to show the importance of sports events for sports brands, the future along with the World Cup tournament, the major brands will inevitably be based on the tournament to launch all kinds of jerseys and sneakers to meet the needs of fans." Zhang Qing said.