5 Sponsorship Lessons From The World Cup

5 Sponsorship Lessons From The World Cup

The world’s biggest sporting event is drawing billions of eyes to Brazil, making it the world’s most important sponsorship event as well.

What can the World Cup teach us about using sponsorship as a marketing vehicle?

Let’s start with brand visibility. Traditionally, we think of visibility as a tool to generate awareness of a brand, product or service.

So what brand do you see in the venues, during television and news coverage and on the FIFA web site? Coca-Cola, already one of the world’s best-known brands, with awareness rates off the charts.

It’s pretty clear that Coca-Cola doesn’t need to increase awareness – in fact it may be statistically impossible for it to do so – yet there it is, dominating the landscape.

And “dominate” may be the key word here – as in dominate the competition. Protecting against competitors is a very expensive strategy, and only relevant to a handful of highly competitive brands.

Lesson one: Make sure you understand the cost/benefit and ROI of sponsorship-based brand awareness.

The Coca-Cola presence on the FIFA home page links to the brand’s sponsorship of the World Cup Trophy Tour.

Tours are a grass-roots marketing tool to bring a brand to the people in a tangible, high-touch way. 

Brazil is a huge consumer market. The tour, not coincidentally, crisscrosses the country.

This is literally where the rubber meets the road in attempting to transfer consumer loyalty.

Lesson two: Extend the impact of your sponsorship through grass-roots activation.

The “Coca-Cola Happiness Flag” stretches nearly the full size of a soccer field and is a mosaic of millions of tiny portraits of real people, submitted from around the globe.

Now you can explore the flag, dominated by Coke red, on an interactive web page and perhaps find yourself.

Lesson three: Invite direct fan participation with your brand.

Coca-Cola filmed grass-roots marketing elements of its sponsorship, which are available on YouTube, linked from the FIFA site.

The flagship video, with over 1.4 million views already in the first few days of the tournament, is “One World, One Game – Brasil, Everyone’s Invited,” which leverages not only passion for the event and its sport, but also emotions associated with patriotism, rebuilding from disaster, seizing opportunity, overcoming hardship and more.

Lesson four: Remember that sponsorship is about emotion.

Few sponsorships have the global impact of a World Cup, and few sponsors have the global clout of a Coca-Cola. However, each sponsorship offers a wealth of opportunities, and only a thoughtful approach deeply rooted in Marketing By Objectives will capture the full value.

Lesson five: Your goals, not the property’s goals, must drive the value equation.