17 Jun 2010
Rob Oubridge, managing director of creative marketing agency Aqueduct, takes a look at the mass of promotional campaigns going on around the World Cup.
The World Cup is here. It is, and has been for the past two or three months, impossible to miss. Even if you have been hiding under a rock, that rock has probably been painted with the cross of St George.
Because, for brands, the World Cup means a procession of football-related promotions and England tie-ins.
The result is a procession of earnest ‘let’s hope our boys do well’ or ‘bring the trophy home’ ad campaigns, a flippant overuse of the St George flag and a lot of lazy, wasteful marketing in an often misguided effort to hop on the advertising world’s virtual jet to South Africa.
So what’s going on here? Clearly it’s topical and it’s emotional and therefore brands want to associate themselves with the World Cup (and specifically, the England team’s hopes) and say ‘Hey! We care about this as much as you do!’.
KitKat’s ‘cross your fingers’ campaign is a good example – the ‘it’s not the despair that kills us, it’s the hope’ theme is personified by an England fan sitting watching a game with the St George Cross painted on her face and fingers crossed. The ad’s message is “cross your fingers for England to hold their nerve and, with a bit of luck, we can do it” – basically it’s saying ‘cross your fingers with KitKat that England win the World Cup’.
However, KitKat (or parent company Nestlé) is not an official World Cup sponsor or FA partner. Mars, on the other hand, is an ‘official supplier’ to the England team and is now in discussion with the FA about possible court action against Nestlé over the ‘fingers crossed’ ad campaign. It says Nestlé is guilty of ‘passing off’ an association with the England team, despite not being an official sponsor.
I fully understand Mars’s reasoning. It pays for the privilege of being associated with the England football team – KitKat does not. The contract between Mars and the FA is only worthwhile if Mars is entitled to the exclusivity the contract is supposed to provide.
It’s a significant point, because if anybody can sell anything in advertising, then all of advertising loses its credibility and that’s not good for any brands. It is irresponsible guerrilla behaviour.
However, it is not a flippant use of the ‘England World Cup hopes’ theme.
Consumers will believe it and buy into the promotion because KitKat is thought of as a very British thing – like a cup of tea. You can understand why Nestlé wants to hop on the World Cup bandwagon and align the KitKat brand with English hopes, because the association is a strong one.
But there are brands that stretch the credulity of England team association too far.
TV manufacturers such as Toshiba and Sony – which aren’t British and aren’t thought of as such – that have ‘Come on England’ themes in their advertising risk damaging their brands. They are diluting their long-term brand messaging with flippant tactical switching. All of a sudden their brands are not about quality because their products are made in Japan – they are all about the England football team. I don’t think consumers buy it.
For brands wanting a share of the pre-World Cup sales hike, short-term tactics like this are not a solution. Promoting core brand values – such as picture quality, a fair price or how stylish a new TV will look in the corner of your living room – is.
Taking a long-term story and meaningful proposition to the market place will be more effective than the short-term tactic of adopting the St George flag. People buy new televisions because they want to watch the World Cup on a quality piece of kit, not because it has an English flag on the side of the box.
It’s also very patronising when consumers are told by a foreign brand of television what emotions they ought to be feeling about the England football team. I wonder if, in a certain percentage of the audience, it doesn’t create brand enemies.
Associating with England and the World Cup has also become a non-differentiator, because every other brand is spending money to ‘support’ the England team in its marketing. Consumers will not buy it.
If there is nothing in your brand story that will make sense to consumers about why you are supporting the England World Cup effort, then one wonders about the value you get out of that in terms of what people believe about your brand – which is what sustains sales in-between ad campaigns.
Short-term thinking like this is gradually eroding the relationship of trust consumers have with advertising and media. It is beyond the suspension of disbelief people need to be able to employ with good advertising. If people watch TV for an hour and see ads for four or five different brands all saying ‘We’re England’, then the effect is diluted.
And if people don’t believe your sentiment about the World Cup, how are they going to believe your claims about your product?
If you are a major sponsor and you’re going to do a whole load of integrated things, it can be a credible association. But for brands that use it as a tactical thing for one ad campaign and then go back to their regular ‘Japanese-built quality and value’ message, it’s a poor hijacking of the England team.
It also makes consumers like me feel hijacked as an English person and a football fan.
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