Source of this article: Time Weekly Author: Tu Mengying Zheng Xutong
The 2020 European Championship, which has been postponed for a year due to the epidemic, has finally started, and domestic companies have been gearing up, hoping to vigorously promote their own brands in overseas markets.
Among the 12 official sponsors of this European Championship, Chinese companies accounted for one-third, including Hisense, Alipay, TikTok, vivo, which was the highest ever, and 4 were from the technology industry.
On June 15, Sankei observer and founder of Nail Technology, Ding Shaojian, said in an interview with the Times Weekly reporter that there are two major reasons why domestic companies are keen on the marketing of the European Cup: one is that these companies are in the rising period of global development and need to expand their brand influence with the help of global sports events; second, the European Cup is one of the three major sports events in the world, with many fans, and proper creative marketing can achieve the integration of products and effects and drive sales.
Image source: Visual China
For Chinese companies, sponsoring the European Cup is a good deal.
"In this European Championship, in the activation of event rights, blocking advertising and score pop-ups are the most core resources. Hisense's brand information exposure time such as fieldside advertising and score pop-ups is expected to reach 7 hours and 8 minutes. It is believed that Hisense's investment in this European Championship can be overrecouped in the domestic market alone. On June 15, Tang Qian, deputy general manager of the brand management department of Hisense Group, told the Times Weekly reporter.
Not only "bringing goods", Chinese companies sponsor the European Cup, and the more important purpose is to further expand overseas markets including Europe.
"In Europe, you can't be [the most talked about brand on the internet] if it's not related to football, it's the lifeblood of European culture." In this regard, said James Rothwell, head of marketing for Europe, middle east and Africa at TikTok.
European Championship marketing battle
Among the four Chinese sponsors, Hisense is no stranger to the European Cup, and won the first Chinese global sponsor quota in the European Cup in 2016.
"After experiencing the 2016 European Championship and the 2018 World Cup, Hisense's in-depth marketing capabilities, brand building and talent team in overseas markets have achieved great development." On June 15, Liu Bin, vice president of Hisense International Marketing Company, told the Times Weekly reporter.
For the belated European Cup, Hisense invested a lot.
On May 6, Hisense hired NBA star Dwyane Wade as a global ambassador, and during the European Cup, he joined hands with Marco Materazzi, Lucas Podolsky and other European football stars to launch the "Upgrade Your Home" activity in Europe; on June 2, Hisense launched the "Hi Gather in Europe" area to support real-time events and full on-demand, and invited Bai Ke, Liu Yuxi, Han Qiaosheng and Wang Tao to form the "Hisense Champion Judging Team".
With such a large investment, Hisense naturally hopes to have a significant upward effect on the sales side. To this end, Hisense launched a series of related marketing activities such as cashback, night package for watching balls, gift package for buying new machines and sending thousands of yuan, and launched a series of joint Hisense U7 champion products.
In contrast, Alipay and TikTok, as Internet platforms, have a more "technological sense" of sponsorship of the European Cup.
Not only investing money, this Year's European Championship Alipay is also responsible for promoting the digital upgrade of the event, such as the opening of the "UEF Europe Cup" Alipay Life Number, which is the only official news release channel for UEFA national events in China at present, and it is also the first ticketing channel opened outside the official website in UEFA history.
In addition, AntChain has become the official global blockchain partner of this European Championship, and the achievements and honors of the winning players in this tournament will be uploaded to AntChain for permanent preservation.
100 days before the start of the European Championship, TikTok launched the "UEFA European Cup" official account, during the competition can release exclusive event content, TikTok will also combine European Cup related topics, produce exclusive AR (augmented reality technology) and other content.
On June 15, Sun Wei, founder of Tsinghua University Fast Marketing, told the Times Weekly reporter that enterprises should first do a good job in marketing positioning and choose more specific marketing methods according to marketing positioning; secondly, according to the characteristics of the platform, choose the corresponding creativity, and choose the appropriate sponsorship methods and activities for their own international market layout.
"No matter how to market, in the end, we must guide the users of the platform to the main products of the enterprise, do a good job of interaction between consumers and goods, and achieve brand exposure conversion." Sun Wei said.
Sports event market cake
Chinese companies have sponsored the European Cup in large part because they have seen the strong "appeal" of sports events.
According to research by consultancy The Business, the global sports market is expected to be worth $599.9 billion by 2025 and $826 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 6.6%.
Earlier, relying on the marketing and promotion of the event, Brands such as Coca-Cola, Samsung, and Sony have achieved great success, as have domestic brands. According to Ipsos data, after sponsoring the World Cup in 2018, Hisense TV's brand recognition in China increased by 12 percentage points.
"If according to all 51 games of euro 2016, Hisense has an average of 8 minutes of advertising exposure per game, and the time of capturing hisense advertisements per game is about 2-3 minutes, taking CCTV5 as an example, the cumulative exposure time between Euro 2016 and the group stage alone is more than 300 million yuan." Tang Qian told the Times Weekly reporter.
According to Hisense forecast, the number of domestic viewers of this European Cup will exceed 2 billion times, or deeply touch more than 100 million domestic people.
Compared with the domestic market, sponsoring the European Cup may be of greater significance to the brand promotion of Chinese enterprises in overseas markets.
On June 15, He Hongbo, the former general manager of Hisense France Branch, who has been working hard in Europe for more than ten years, told the Times Weekly reporter that spending money to sponsor the European Cup and building factories in Europe will make European cooperative customers put down the stereotype of "enterprises coming to Europe to make quick money" and think that enterprises are seriously doing brands and seeking long-term development.
"This makes it much easier for Hisense to recruit people locally." He Hongbo said.
On the 16th, the relevant person in charge of vivo told the Times Weekly reporter that the cooperation with UEFA to sponsor the European Cup is an important milestone for vivo to establish emotional communication with global users, and vivo hopes to reach global football fans in the next 4 years.
The overseas road of technology companies
Although the four Chinese companies sponsored this time are all intending to expand overseas markets, there are also differences between them.
On June 15, Guo Yuxuan, a researcher at the Beijing Institute of Economics, told the Times Weekly reporter that the international propaganda of Vivo and Hisense is more for the purpose of changing the strategy, taking the overseas market route, and breaking away from the "involution" of brand competition in the domestic market, and making up for the decline in market share caused by excessive domestic competition with the growth of overseas markets.
In recent years, Hisense has significantly accelerated its efforts to expand overseas markets. In 2018, Hisense acquired a 95% stake in Japan's Toshiba Imaging Solutions Company and acquired Gorenje, a high-end European white-power brand; at the beginning of this year, Hisense invested more than 1 billion yuan to build a new home appliance production plant in Monterrey, Mexico, mainly producing white goods and kitchen appliances; in March this year, Hisense launched the acquisition of Japan's Sanden Holdings. In the first quarter of this year, Hisense Group's overseas revenue accounted for more than 42% of total revenue.
Vivo, which is currently opening up the situation in India, Indonesia, Thailand and other places, is also eager to further open up the European market.
The relevant person in charge of vivo told the Times Weekly reporter that the sponsorship of the European Cup is vivo's long-term strategy to establish popularity overseas and reach the audience, and vivo will continue to expand related businesses on a global scale.
At present, vivo has 400 million users in more than 40 countries around the world. In October 2020, Vivo officially announced its entry into the European markets such as Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom; at the beginning of this year, Vivo announced its entry into the Romanian and Czech markets, planning to enter the Serbian and Austrian markets in the first half of the year, and plans to cover more than 12 European markets during the year.
Guo Yuxuan believes that in contrast, Alipay and TikTok's expansion into overseas markets is not based on domestic competitive pressure, but more for further development and expanding the scale of users.
According to the prospectus of Ant Group, to which Alipay belongs, the development of cross-border payment and merchant services is one of the group's four major development strategies. In January 2019, Alipay announced that it had more than 1 billion users worldwide, but only 9 countries and regions had a local version of Alipay except China. By 2020, Ali has reached a cooperation with the French silver Genico company, and Alipay is expected to land in Europe by the end of this year.
Similar to Alipay, in March this year, there were media reports that TikTok was accelerating its expansion in Europe, and in just 6 months, TikTok's european staff had almost doubled and it had rented a new office in east London.
Sensor Tower data shows that in May 2021, Douyin and its overseas version of TikTok won the global mobile app (non-game) download list with more than 80 million downloads.