Field marketing: Reach out to your audience when football fever strikes

The FIFA World Cup is an ideal vehicle for field marketing. But the traditional game of handing out samples and making sure products are in store has fallen out of favour; field marketing is now about integrating promotions with new digital channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather valuable customer data.

While official FIFA sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Adidas and Budweiser are leveraging their global involvement at a local level, companies such as Carlsberg (see Client View, page 27), Nando’s, Spar and Budgens are also using this summer’s expected football mania to reach out to sports fans.

Simon Couch, head of field marketing at agency RPM, says that for this tournament, brands are using field marketing in a more sophisticated way than ever before. “A brief may have come in for the last World Cup and it would have been quite isolated,” he says. “It might have said we have to hand out a certain number of samples or interact with a set amount of people.

“This time we are seeing wider briefs - we can look at social media, public relations or work with other agencies. We have to keep on the front foot of production innovation, such as making sure you take videos that people have just made and getting them on the web immediately.”

Coca-Cola, as an official tournament sponsor, aims to make sure its field marketing is one part of a larger media mix. It is executing its strategy - focusing on the history of celebration - in 160 countries at various levels. One of its biggest field marketing events will be at FIFA’s “Fan Fest”, where matches will be broadcast live in nine cities in South Africa and in Mexico City, London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney.

“The Fan Fest is where the consumer is immersed in the world of football and the world of celebration, brought to them by Coca-Cola. We need people to live the campaign physically to experience it,” says Emmanuel Seuge, Coca-Cola’s group director for, worldwide sports and entertainment marketing.

It is also running discrete field marketing activities across the globe, such as a promotion in Mexico where a parade will be held and 500,000 Coca-Cola squeeze bottles given out to fans. While this is to be expected of a brand on this scale, according to Sharon Richey, managing director of agency BEcause, she thinks Coca-Cola needs to get more personal in its field marketing.

“The bigger brands tend to think globally in terms of their messaging and advertising. If they can get it to a nice simple level, such as handing a chilled Coke to people queuing to get into stadia, that is a nice way to win hearts and minds,” she says.

For Seuge, all parts of the campaign are equal. “The promotions are as strategic as building the brand; it is at the core of what we are doing. If you go to stores right now, a lot of activation for Coke and Powerade is leveraging the World Cup platform to drive sales, whether it is winning tickets to a game or having kids as flagbearers during the matches.”

The innovation in field marketing for Coke during this World Cup has been to start talking to retailers early about activity. He explains/ “We were ready six months earlier than we were in 2006. This time we met customers 18 months in advance. We were talking to Carrefour, Wal-Mart and Tesco as early as January 2009. You might not think of it as a sexy innovation, but from a business standpoint, it is.”

Meanwhile, Carlsberg, which is not an official FIFA sponsor but does sponsor the England team, is combining live field marketing events with technology. It has just finished a three-month roadshow tour of UK supermarkets, football stadia and holiday camps, focusing on the brand’s “Probably the best team talk in the world” campaign, which is running through the line.

While on a basic field marketing level to drive sales - fans are handed money-off coupons to be used against four-packs in stores - the tour sees people encouraged to use social media to spread the word about the World Cup - and Carlsberg. This keeps the influence of the beer brand active beyond the events themselves.

Blending technology with real experiences is the way to get noticed, says Mike Dunne, a senior account manager at Carlsberg’s agency Ignite. He says: “By using digital, the brand can carry on a dialogue while the event is taking place and beyond. Experiential engages as many senses as possible. It has the benefit of being face-to-face as people buy from people.”

Small UK supermarket chain Budgens is also using the World Cup to boost sales by working with suppliers for deals on products to run throughout the tournament. It plans to promote these both via leaflets and on the internet.

Budgens managing director Phil Smith says: “There will be a heightened presence online so consumers can see our World Cup deals on our website. And this year our retail partners will be able to go online and order bespoke point-of-sale in-store displays.”

Supermarket brand Spar launched its “Taste The Atmosphere” World Cup campaign earlier this month. Its UK marketing manager Andy Burt says talking to customers frequently is the key to getting them into stores.

“Consumers need to know you are geared up for the tournament before they even enter the store. Leafleting and posters with your strongest deals will encourage footfall, but once the person has come in, the impact must be instant,” he claims. “Keep the promotional theme consistent, keep up to date with fixtures and talk to your customers using daily events. Get into the spirit of the World Cup and your customers will soon be back for more.”

The Co-operative retail outlets will also be involved in the summer World Cup rush, offering customers the chance to win a football kit for their local children’s team when buying five own-brand products. Football-themed cup cakes will be available from May and own-brand pizzas are appearing in football packaging. It is working with World Cup sponsors Budweiser and Coke on competitions to win tickets to an England match and the final.

The convenience sector and smaller supermarket chains will benefit considerably from field marketing, according to David Norbury, chief executive of agency REL, and he would like to see brands doing a lot in-store. “It’s not just about on-pack, it’s about bringing sponsorship alive with competitions to make the activity more dynamic than a leaflet,” he says.

Online-only brands are also getting in on the act. The Hut Group, which runs websites such as Zavvi.com, will run World Cup “Love it or hate it” themed promotions across its sites. Its commercial director Richard Chapple says: “We are running themes for people who are on a World Cup detox or are World Cup junkies. We are putting ourselves in the minds of consumers - it only happens once every four years so we are making it fun.”

Restaurant brand Nando’s will make the most of its South African origins for its football-themed marketing. It has even produced an app so that fans going to South Africa can find their nearest Nando’s.

However, Nando’s UK marketing manager David Manly says: “Many more people go to pubs or stay at home to watch the game, and no amount of promos or discounts are going to change that behaviour. Therefore, we will focus on localised marketing in and around the restaurants to encourage people to get their chilli kicks before the game.”

Whether brands are officially involved with the World Cup or not, the potential for running field marketing activity with a football theme is clearly too alluring to resist. Those brands combining field activity with other marketing methods seem set to benefit from such a strategy. Just like at the matches themselves, brands will have to wait and see which tactics their competitors employ during the tournament, but it promises to be worth the wait.