- 01
- JUL
- 2010
World Cup marketing - the holy grail or fool's gold?
Author: Jordan Early - Categories: Indirect Spend
As a marketing opportunity, the World Cup - rather like Brazil - is hard to beat. The planet's biggest football tournament does more than simply pit the world's best teams against each other - it also offers some of the largest names in the corporate world an unparalleled opportunity to tap into a global audience running into the billions.
It's estimated that football's governing body, FIFA, will rake in a profit approaching £2.5 billion from sponsorship alone from the four-week tournament, so it's little surprise that the likes of Sony, Adidas and Coca-Cola were falling over themselves to be associated with the first World Cup to be held in continental Africa.
FIFA named six official 'partners' for the tournament, but other companies have also paid huge sums in an effort to cash-in on the World Cup's unique appeal.
Just how much of a say procurement had in the extraordinary fees paid to FIFA by the marketing arms of those companies is unclear – but some recent research has suggested that maybe some hard-nosed procurement executives would do well to have more influence when deals are being struck for the 2014 tournament in Brazil.
According to a poll by Lightspeed Research in Marketing magazine, 88% of people questioned during England's first World Cup match against the USA said that their opinion of the official sponsors had not changed as a result of their association with the tournament.
Furthermore, just 8% of those questioned claimed that sponsorship of the World Cup had had a positive effect on their perception of that brand, with 84% saying that they were no more likely to buy a brand because of its World Cup association.
Perhaps more significantly, there was a great degree of uncertainty relating to which companies were actually 'official' World Cup partners and which weren't – and it's these findings that should set alarm bells ringing in procurement circles, and in some of the most influential boardrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.
According to the study, 30% of consumers wrongly believed that Mastercard was an official World Cup partner compared with the 37% that correctly acknowledged Visa's role as a supporting sponsor of the tournament.
Coca-Cola can perhaps breathe more easily than most, with 65% of respondents identifying it as the most recognisable sponsor. Emirates, meanwhile, enjoyed a hit-rate of just 23%.
These are the kind of figures to give procurement nightmares, and once again bring into question which area of the business should be responsible for putting a figure on involvement in major sporting events such as the current tournament in South Africa – procurement or marketing?
Marketing would doubtless argue that they have the necessary experience and knowledge to have the major say. This latest research suggests that procurement might beg to differ.
