Reference no: EM132221407

Case: Breakdown

A personn was just awarded a contract to serve as a consultant regarding the myriad business opportunities that emerged from the most recent World Cup of Soccer played in Russia. There starting salary will be $270,000 per year. Apparently, there keen and nuanced understanding of strategic marketing was pivotal toward winning the contract. (Your substantial salary means that there college office likely will call you, soon, requesting donations to support endowed professorships, new buildings, etc.)

They're are expected to earn a salary (welcome to the world of high-powered, high-profit consulting, where 80 hours of work per week are not uncommon). Your primary task is to provide counsel to your firm and client(s) about promising marketing opportunities vis-à-vis a future World Cup sponsored by FIFA. A brief introduction to that event follows. It is not intended to be exhaustive; you will want to do your own search to learn about important, relevant issues.

An Introduction to the FIFA World Cup

Sport is a ubiquitous artifact of human culture. Most if not all cultures have various forms of play and games, which can range from informal activities engaged by a few individuals to organized sports and events that capture the time, resources and imaginations of consumers and companies around the globe. Such organized sports can be transcendent, lucrative, costly, divisive and unifying – locally and globally. Much of organized sport is big business, affecting millions of lives. This business cannot succeed without the complex interplay of cultures, markets, marketing and consumer behavior, finance, and politics.

Consider, for example, soccer or football as it is known in most countries. In 2018, teams from 32 countries met in Russia for the quadrennial event known simply as “the World Cup” (officially recognized as the FIFA World Cup – a trademark protecting the interests of Fédération Internationale de Football). Thirty-one national teams survived a brutal series of qualifying matches over a span of two years for the right to play in the “finals” along with the host country. Once gathered in Russia, these 32 teams played elimination matches culminating in a final game to determine the world champion. France defeated Croatia in that game and thus is the reigning world champion, until the next World Cup tournament, to be played in Qatar, in 2022.

How popular is this event? It is estimated that a total cumulative television audience of several billions of fans watched the matches of the 2018 World Cup in Russia; more than 3.2 billion television viewers – i.e., nearly half the people on the planet – may have watched the final game (The Fédération Internationale de Football Association 2018). These measures do not include consumer and marketer activities on or regarding video streams, websites, blogs and chat rooms.

The marketing opportunities are staggering; the implications for local and global consumers directly and indirectly involved in this spectacle are almost hard to fathom. Sponsors pay huge sums of money for exclusive rights to teams, players, and ancillary events. Other companies not recognized as official sponsors find clever ways to be associated with this extravaganza.

Some of this text is gleaned from a stream of research and publications on the FIFA World Cup, including documents presented by Shultz et al. at the Conference for the Academy of Marketing Science, various Macromarketing Conferences, and raw data collected by the research team in Leipzig, Zagreb, Rijeka, Munich, Berlin, Moscow, Chis?ina?u, Bogotá, New York, London, Sarajevo, Puerto Alegre, and Chicago during and following the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

2 Billions of people organize their lives around the FIFA World Cup; among the people and institutions affected: soccer players (obviously), grounds-keepers, spectators, pub-crawlers, diners, gamblers, police and soldiers, contractors, policy makers, hotels and airlines, sporting goods companies, beverage manufacturers, distributors, all manner of service providers, including of course purveyors of the world’s oldest profession. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find someone or something not directly or indirectly affected by the FIFA World Cup, albeit some more than others.

During the month of the tournament, some factories cease operations, restaurant and bar patronage surges and retreats, water flow is affected in entire cities, fans purchase and proudly wear replica shirts, and so forth. Life markedly changes, the world over. This enthusiasm, or fanaticism, is captured well in “Live It Up,” the Official Music Video for the 2018 World Cup, featuring Nicky Jam, Will Smith and Era Istrefi, which has more than 140 million hits and counting, to date; rogue copies of the video have hundreds of millions more hits. The enduring longevity of these videos and other World-Cup-related videos speaks volumes to the World Cup and the brands and stars who attach themselves to them.

There is much to like about the FIFA World Cup, which is why governments, corporations, consumers and even the Pope gravitate toward it. As suggested above, the tournament elicits the best in humanity: play, community, respect, cooperation, altruism, optimism, compassion, joy and even euphoria, and potentially, as the Holy Father urged, peace and solidarity. Unfortunately, it also spurs some of the worst: greed, corruption, exploitation, bullying, hubris, disenfranchisement, xenophobia, and sometimes violence. Soccer’s World Cup is a reflection, of sorts, for the human condition.

The FIFA World Cup clearly provides a quintessential example of the interplay of culture, globalization, politics, brands, products, services, marketing. Indeed, one cannot help but to ponder the marketing and consumption dynamics during and after Russia 2018, and moving forward to the Women’s World Cup in 2019, to be played in France; the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar and the 2026 Men’s World Cup co-hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico. So again, congratulations on being awarded the contract for this consultancy, which begins by answering the following questions, on the next page. Incidentally, the extent to which you are a fan, or are not a fan, of the FIFA World Cup is not requisite to your success on this consultancy; remember, your keen and nuanced understanding of strategic marketing was/is pivotal toward winning the contract and to offering good counsel to your client.

Thoughts and Questions on Case:

1) Pick a client and say what it is. What is your client’s interest in the FIFA World Cup; what is the missed or undeveloped product or service opportunity for your client vis-à-vis a future FIFA World Cup?

2) Following-up, conduct a strategic position analysis to determine if your client’s core competencies or strengths coincide well with market opportunities, vis-à-vis the product or service you have selected.

3) How is your client positioned?

4) Does the relevant product/service/organization of your client have differential advantage(s) (what and why)? How do you know?  

5) What type of consumer problem solving would one have to do, to “purchase” this product/service/organization; why? Is the product or service “high involvement”?

6) Where is FIFA on the PLC? What are the implications for future growth?

7) What is the relevance of brand equity of your proposed client(s) and potential customers? Does your client have brand equity?

8) Describe, an advertisement or some other creative initiative relevant to ideas you have expressed. Whom have you targeted and what is the purpose of the advertisement or creative initiative; why would it be effective (or not effective)?

9) Who are the most important stakeholders of your client; why?

10) What is the one question that should have been asked, but was not asked vis-à-vis the strategic marketing objectives? Clearly articulate that question, and then answer it.