Global Scope: Sports Marketing

Marketing campaigns are a great way to get fans connected to their favorite players, teams, leagues. Here in the United States it is very common to see teams, leagues and even players create marketing campaigns that serve the purpose of getting closer to the fans. This is nothing new for anyone who follows big time American sports, but for football (soccer) fans in other parts of the Americas it is a totally different reality. Professional sports teams and organizations in Brazil, for example, function in a very amateur form. Since there are very few sports professionals, most executive offices have former players or known figures making decisions that they are probably not prepared to make.

With Brazil winning the bid to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup/2013 Confederations Cup, and the 2016 Olympics there has been a start of a "catching up" phase. Most of the people with resources are looking into sports as possible new investments, and a lot of sport agencies are being created where a market for sports business was barely even existent. Higher education institutions are quickly preparing themselves to offer undergraduate programs in sport management, with professors specializing themselves overseas and then coming back to teach. It was only a matter of time until this "sports business epidemic" caught on over there.

There are two specific cases that were really interesting. One is with a first division club called Botafogo FR from Rio de Janeiro and the other was with EC Vitória, a second division team (on pace to make it back to the first division) from Salvador. The first campaign was a partnership between Botafogo and its athletic equipment sponsor, Puma. They decided to make the team's third option uniforms in gold, instead of the team's traditional colors of black and white. The reason behind it was that it was supposed to be in honor of Botafogo's fans. The team was going to wear it for the first time on September 23rd's match against reigning Brazilian champions Corinthians FC. Puma and Botafogo then decided to get 11 fans that had "season tickets" and give them the chance to watch the game from a special luxury box, with the presence of some former players. However, they also surprised the fans by having 11 flags in the stands with their names on them and the 11 starters for Botafogo that day would play the entire game with the fans' names on the back of their jerseys.

This is the campaign video

The second campaign, and in my opinion one of the best marketing campaigns I've ever heard of, was by EC Vitória, a very prestigious club in the city of Salvador. The team's official colors are red and black, but for this specific campaign they tweaked that a little and became a black and white team. The team's number 1 kit is composed of horizontal thick red and black stripes. For this campaign, the team started out with its four red stripes becoming white, turning the uniform into black and white horizontal stripes. The team partnered with a local blood bank in Salvador and every time the number of blood donors increased a certain amount, one of the stripes would become red again. The results were so impressive that it made the team's biggest rival, EC Bahia also from Salvador, want to do something similar. The local blood bank was receiving thousands of fans coming in with one of the two team's jerseys, and the rival fans admitted to going because of the campaign. Now, EC Bahia's marketing department is working on a new marketing venture to dive into and make their fans proud as well. 

This is the campaign video (unfortunately only in portuguese, but still interesting just to have a feel from it)