From the financial services industry’s point
of view, football’s truly global nature makes it an obvious
candidate for sponsorship, even in the case of an Asia-focused bank
sponsoring a UK football club. Standard Chartered said its
sponsorship will “provide the platform to significantly step up the
bank’s brand awareness across its core markets in Asia, Africa and
the Middle East”.

Standard Chartered spokesman Tim Baxter told
RBI that Liverpool’s global fan base encompasses some 130
million fans, well over half of whom are to be found in Asia.

Baxter cited figures of 6 million fans in
India and 5 million in Thailand, though it is China which has by
far the largest single fan base.

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“Liverpool have about 60 million fans in
China… We have done a lot of work on this and from our point of
view there is a considerable overlap between Liverpool’s
international fan base and Standard Chartered’s markets,” he
said.

That overlap could increase still further if
Standard Chartered emerges as the winning bidder of the Chinese,
Indian and Malaysian banking assets currently being sold by Royal
Bank of Scotland.

“Liverpool has almost 90,000 hours of
television coverage per year, so you can see immediately that the
deal has good value for us,” Baxter added.

For now, Liverpool’s games against the
continent’s best teams will more likely be associated with
UniCredit, given the Italian bank’s newfound role as sponsor of the
Champions League competition for the next three years. Speaking to
RBI in July, however, UniCredit deputy CEO Roberto
Nicastro said that the bank was not expecting to sell more products
on the back of the sponsorship and instead saw the deal as
invaluable method of boosting brand awareness (see RBI 617).

A brand differentiator

Football’s ability to be a key brand
differentiator in mature markets has not gone unnoticed by Asian
banks either. South Korea, home to one of the most developed
consumer banking markets on the continent, has played host to a
variety of football-related sponsorship deals and product
innovations since the last World Cup, held in Germany in 2006.

The offers included Woori Bank’s commitment to
raise interest rates on its one-year time deposits by 0.2 percent
every time South Korea’s star football player, Park Ji-Sung, scored
a goal during the tournament. Shinhan Bank, meanwhile, offered
discounted currency rates to customers who had tickets for World
Cup games in Germany.

The advent of the 2010 World Cup, to be held
in South Africa, has once again led to a spate of South Korean
football sponsorship initiatives, most notably in the shape of Hana
Bank, which in June 2009 became the official sponsor of the South
Korean national football team.

Elsewhere the focus is even more long-term: in
Brazil, Itaú-Unibanco is banking on its sponsorship of the 2014
World Cup as a means of fostering a sea-change in consumer payment
habits.

“Credit cards are not the preferred means of
payment in soccer stadiums or any sports arenas, but we are pretty
much creating a network right now to change that through
discounting programmes,” Itaú-Unibanco’s director of credit cards
Carlos Zanvettor told RBI.

All eyes on South Africa

But it is South Africa which is home
to the major bank-led football sponsorship deals thanks to the 2010
World Cup. While FirstRand is the exclusive banking sponsor of the
tournament, two of the country’s other leading banks now have
well-established football branding agreements in place: Absa,
through its sponsorship of South Africa’s top-tier football league;
and Standard Bank, via its sponsorship of the African Cup of
Nations and a host of other pan-African tournaments.

On 22 September Standard Bank announced that
it was reaffirming its commitment to African football with the
signing of an eight-year deal with the Confederation of African
Football (CAF). The bank will also use former star Abedi Pele, its
chief football ambassador, to host an eight-country tour across the
continent, giving fans the chance to see the African Cup of Nations
Trophy.

“I think the World Cup is going to be
fantastic for South Africa. We are big sponsors of South African
football so we are obviously going to maximise our exposure, and
that is always good for a bank,” said Absa CEO Maria Ramos,
speaking to RBI earlier in September (see RBI 618).

Extensive marketing
campaign

In terms of World Cup sponsorship,
it was FirstRand Group that stole a march on its rivals back in
2006 when it became the financial services National Supporter for
the 2010 World Cup at a cost of $30 million.

The group’s banking subsidiary,
First National Bank (FNB), subsequently embarked upon an extensive
marketing and product campaign which has reaped rewards for the
company.

Speaking to RBI, FNB brand director
Derek Carstens said that the bank had improved its share of the
country’s retail banking market by several percentage points on the
back of the deal.

“Our research showed there is an
extraordinarily high propensity for people to do business with
companies who sponsor the World Cup, because it’s such a big
popular event for the mass market. In terms of market share, we
were sitting at about 20 percent and were looking to go up to 26
percent.”

Carstens, whose work with FNB has led to him
being seconded to the World Cup organising committee as chief
marketing officer for the 2010 tournament, oversaw a huge branding
initiative which has involved the launch of several products and
services, a programme building artificial pitches around the
country, the installation of 2010 countdown clocks at national
airports, the airing of a Countdown 2010 television show, and
promotions involving ticket, soccer ball and ‘Kuduzela’ instrument
giveaways.

Yet FNB’s first target market was not
consumers but its staff, according to Carstens.

“We took about a quarter of our tickets
available to us and made those available to our staff, with the
idea of improving their product knowledge so they could serve our
customers better. You had to pass a knowledge test every quarter –
only if you got over 60 percent could you go into the draw for
tickets,” he said.

“18,000 of our staff participated over a
two-year period, and it really succeeded in raising product
awareness.”

Ticket giveaways were also a key pillar of
FNB’s wider product campaigns, which often saw the promotions
linked to more than one product in an attempt to boost the bank’s
cross-sell ratios.

“The tickets are like gold dust, so we made a
large proportion of our tickets available to our customers
providing they conformed to certain behaviours with regards to
buying and using products,” said Carstens.

“Quite a lot of the ticket promotions were
linked to a number of actions – swipe cards, debit cards and
multiple card usage for example. You had to exhibit one, two or
even three types of behaviours. It’s very much driven by multiple
product usage.”

Linked to a savings
account

FNB also linked sales of World Cup
footballs to a savings account, but its most innovative
cross-purpose promotion was the launch of the Kuduzela earlier this
summer.

Based on a Kudu horn, an old African
instrument, the Kuduzelas were promoted as a way of expressing
support for the national team, and were linked to the purchase of
an FNB prepaid card account. Carstens said the bank ordered some
150,000 of the instruments and promptly sold them all within two
months.

FNB has also leveraged its mobile banking
platform, giving away Kuduzelas to customers who topped up their
airtime via FNB’s mobile service.

Other benefits have also arisen from the
sponsorship deal: FirstRand has been able to work more closely with
World Cup sponsors from other sectors, with Carstens optimistic
that there would be more opportunities for cross-promotion in
future.

“Visa has been an important partner – we’re
the biggest Visa issuer in the country and they are one of the
primary worldwide sponsors. We’ve also been able to work with other
sponsors such as Adidas,” he explained.

The bank has worked to ensure that its
relationship with football fans does not expire at the end of the
2010 tournament: its pitch-building programme is helping it to
build an ongoing presence in specific communities, creating a
platform via which staff from local FNB branches can go and do
business, according to Carstens.

He concluded: “We’ve seen a really good uptake
in all product lines, and our market share is now where we were
aiming for. Quantifying that in terms of the value of the deal has
produced a very handsome return on equity for us”.