As the World Cup approaches, while the enthusiasm of global fans is still brewing, global companies have already quietly moved around the World Cup's " Sports Marketing ". As a representative of my country's overseas enterprises and a well-known domestic home appliance company, Hisense , he launched a series of marketing activities for the global market around the World Cup as early as the beginning of this year. Recently, it has jointly launched an environmental protection public welfare classroom activity with FIFA in Johannesburg, South Africa to popularize environmental protection knowledge and skills for local young people and inspire them to save more green courts through practical actions.
As we all know, as one of the world's most influential sports events, the huge "traffic dividend" that can gather in a short period of time has always been a rare brand marketing opportunity for enterprises. Especially this year, facing the surge in market uncertainty and increasingly fierce competition in the domestic market, expanding business to the overseas "going overseas" route of global development has become an important direction for domestic enterprises to survive. The World Cup, a sports event that can attract global attention, is a rare opportunity for domestic overseas companies seeking overseas promotion.
However, overseas publicity is different from domestic ones. Due to differences in language, culture and environment, laws and regulations, even large multinational companies often fall into a passive situation in brand and product marketing. Although most companies have thought of using the borderlessness of sports influence to improve their " brand awareness " among audiences in different countries and regions, sports marketing is different from traditional marketing. Sports marketing does not only require accurate control of the compatibility between corporate brand and sports project influence. Moreover, more diversified global perspectives and the allocation capabilities of related resources are needed.
Faced with the sports marketing scenario, more companies will seek professional sports marketing agencies to cooperate, especially multinational companies for global markets. Hisense's marketing for this World Cup has chosen SPORTFIVE/Lagardele Sports as the creative marketing agency of Hisense FIFA2022 Qatar World Cup™, providing it with comprehensive integrated marketing services, including sports marketing strategy consulting, creative activation of digital media platforms, offline event planning and comprehensive project management services. It is understood that in Hisense's charity activities, SPORTFIVE provides Hisense with the planning and shooting of public welfare theme advertising films, design of public welfare classroom tutorials, jointly painting "The stadium in my mind", and supporting online theme marketing activities.
Now, the World Cup is about to start, how will enterprises deal with it? In the future, in a broader global market, how will Chinese companies make good use of the influence of various sports events and expand their global awareness of their brands? These are all issues that companies need to think about at the moment. Recently, Echo Li, CEO and senior vice president of SPORTFIVE Greater China, elaborated in detail in an interview with reporters about her views on "sports marketing" on companies going overseas, and how Chinese companies can make full use of sports marketing to expand their brand's global influence in the global market.
"On overseas" enterprises and "Sports Marketing"
"Sports marketing is a forward-looking and coordinated strategy that can provide enterprises with diversified strategic directions, strengthen the company's brand competitiveness, and continue to attract products." Li Ying, who has been engaged in global sports marketing for more than ten years, explained her understanding of "sports marketing". In her opinion, if a company wants to open up an unfamiliar market, sports IP and sports events are one of the best marketing tools for brands to go overseas. The combination of enterprises and international sports events can use the help of related sports to accurately focus on the target group and establish interaction with the group to quickly enhance the brand influence. And these are all based on the fact that human consensus on the nature of sports comes from the boundlessness of sports.
Modern sports have undergone transformation of industrialization and urbanization, strengthening the sense of belonging and honor provided by sports projects to people, and becoming an indispensable product to aggregate people's spiritual consensus. No matter the times change, people's enthusiasm for sports has not diminished at all. There are the Olympics that the Chinese are proud of, and the flags of various countries floating in the crowded stands of the World Cup.Of course, sports' global influence is not limited to this, including the rugby game " Super Bowl " known as the North American "Spring Festival Gala", European football " La Liga ", " Premier League ", NBA Lakers, Knicks , the popular "League of Legends" and e-sports teams in the world, these are sports events with huge influence in their regions.
Such a huge influence will inevitably bring huge commercial value. According to statistics from relevant institutions, during the 2018 World Cup , brands invested a total of US$2.4 billion in advertising expenses, and Chinese brands accounted for nearly 35%. Many well-known Chinese brands, including Hisense, Mengniu , and vivo, participated. It is reported that during the World Cup in Russia, Hisense TV's sales share exceeded 20%, setting a historical record and leading the second place by 6 percentage points.
"Sports has the power to cross national boundaries, culture, age and unite people's hearts. Taking advantage of sports influence through sports marketing is a marketing shortcut for brands to open up international market visibility and promote regional market sales growth." Li Ying believes.
As the "SPORTFIVE/Lagardale Sports" that has been in China for 30 years, it has unique insights on how to help Chinese companies conduct brand marketing at home and abroad through sports events. It is understood that SPORTFIVE assists top event sponsorship cooperation signed by well-known Chinese brands such as Hisense, OPPO, and Qingdao Beer in many sports fields such as football, basketball, golf, e-sports, swimming, rugby .
uses the domestic marketing model, and companies will not adapt to the local conditions when going overseas
During the 2018 World Cup, some domestic brands chose the marketing activity of "guessing for free" which aroused heated discussion and attention on the Internet at that time. Therefore, during this year's World Cup, many companies intend to copy this marketing form into overseas brand promotion, hoping to achieve the same publicity effect as in domestic promotion in overseas promotion. However, in Li Ying's view, there are unpredictable risks for companies to adopt the same form of publicity overseas.
"In the process of going overseas, enterprises will face regional differences, cultural differences and unique consumption behaviors in various markets. They will rashly adopt effective publicity methods in China. They are likely to be unacceptable to local conditions, and even worse, they will violate local laws and have irreversible negative impacts on the brand." Li Ying believes that the choice of marketing methods is a process of seeking common ground while reserving differences. It requires both localized marketing for different regions and consistent marketing for the global market. The same is true for sports marketing. World-class events like the World Cup are for hundreds of millions of viewers in different regions around the world. They need to choose a consensus marketing method so that the brand promotion effect can be maximized.
In the face of sports marketing, the traditional way of entering the company is to choose world-class competitions to join the official sponsor system of the event, sponsor popular teams, and select a certain player as the spokesperson. In Li Ying's view, reaching sponsorship cooperation is only the starting point of the sports marketing track. In view of the corporate brand’s own situation, select sports resources, communicate customized rights and interests with resource parties based on the brand’s marketing pain points, transform traditional “sports sponsorship” into highly innovative and interactive sports marketing, and use creativity to drive all-round marketing and release brand potential, so as to help the corporate brand and sports influence organically combine it and pave the way for in-depth brand building.
In this regard, the SPORTFIVE Chinese team has planned and executed creative marketing for Hisense in 18 markets around the world around the 2018 World Cup, and created the "SEE THE INCREDIBLE TOUR" World Cup roadshow and digital social media event, and successfully held the first Hisense Global Customer Conference with the brand. During this period, Hisense interacted with hundreds of millions of fans and consumers around the world through the World Cup stage, and a total of 3.1 million fans visited the Hisense brand exhibition area. The "SEE THE INCREDIBLE TOUR" event exceeded 19 million video views, and the total number of social media readings reached 350 million.
At the same time, Li Ying emphasized that sports marketing is a systematic marketing system. How to maintain people's attention to corporate brands when a competition ends and the popularity dissipates is also the focus of sports marketing.
"As an aspect of brand marketing, sports marketing is also a logical and continuous system. Assisting brand sponsorship sports IP is the first step in realizing brand globalization, and how to activate sponsorship is the key to the subsequent key." Li Ying said.
In this regard, in the marketing planning project of Hisense for this year's Qatar World Cup, SPORTFIVE has planned a series of early brand promotions for Hisense including charity, marble World Cup and theme planning #PerfectMatch. Including recently, Hisense and FIFA jointly launched an environmental protection public welfare classroom event in Johannesburg, South Africa. This series of charity activities have established a positive impact on Hisense's overseas brand promotion, established a good reputation for Hisense's brand promotion in the World Cup, and ensured the integrity of Hisense's overall brand promotion.
"localization" and "new trends" of sports marketing
In Li Ying's view, China's sports marketing development is still in the development stage, so many overseas companies only focus on sports marketing such as the World Cup, Olympic Games, and NBA, which are well-known in China. "In fact, after going overseas, Chinese companies can choose more local sports and try new digital promotional forms."
Faced with the "inversion" of many international big brands in world-class events, Chinese brands can choose more local sports marketing. For example, in the United States, you can choose baseball , rugby, Boston Marathon related events; in the Southeast Asian market, you can choose Southeast Asian Football Championship ; in European regions and countries, you can choose European Cup , Champions League and football clubs. Such targeted sports marketing can often maximize the effectiveness of brand promotion.
Take OPPO as an example. In the past few years, with the promotion of SPORTFIVE, OPPO has successively reached cooperation with international sports IPs such as Neymar , Southeast Asian Football Championship, and Boston Marathon. In July this year, it helped OPPO reach an official partnership with UEFA , becoming the first Chinese smartphone brand to cooperate with UEFA's top club events.
Li Ying said that in order to ensure the overall promotion effect of customers, SPORTFIVE will analyze and strategic design based on the local language, cultural customs, product needs and consumption habits of different countries to fully explore customer brand needs. At present, SPORTFIVE has more than 1,200 localization experts in 15 countries and regions around the world. Various branches work together to convey the power of commercial growth through professional industry knowledge, broad global vision, and innovative ideological to enterprises and sports IP parties based on local market demands.
At the same time, in Li Ying's view, digital media and e-sports being included in sports projects have become a trend that sports marketing cannot be ignored.
In terms of digital media, various digital media including short videos will bring new changes to sports marketing. How to quickly understand the cooperation rules and creative gameplay of various media platforms, build a communication matrix and select media content for brand advertising and brand implantation, so that the media delivery effect can be maximized into a new track for sports marketing.
It is reported that during the 2018 World Cup, SPORTFIVE helped the brand launch many exclusive behind-the-scenes videos on social media, attracting the attention of a large number of digital viewers. This year, SPORTFIVE helped Hisense carry out the operation and preparation of online Instagram and Twitter social accounts, and successfully planned the Hisense World Cup marble game, which was exposed millions on overseas social platforms.
Esports has a considerable influence among young people and has become an incremental market for sports marketing in the post-epidemic era.As for the e-sports field, SPORTFIVE continues to maintain close contact with developers such as Riot, Blizzard , and is a global business partner of the League of Legends LEC League under Riot , and exclusively represents the business cooperation of Southeast Asian regional League of Legends, League of Legends mobile games, and Valorant.
Nowadays, it is a new window for Chinese brands to go overseas. Faced with the increasing market uncertainty, Chinese companies need to establish a global brand image and seek certainty for their own development. Sports marketing happens to be a high-quality tool that companies can use with the flow. According to Li Ying, on the eve of the opening of the World Cup, SPORTFIVE has contacted many brands for inquiries about national team resources, and is also preparing for the World Cup hospitality activation projects of Budweiser Beer , Coca-Cola , VISA, and planning fan carnivals and other activities. "The World Cup in November will be the end of the marketing battle for various corporate brands this year, bringing an end to the complicated year."
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