BUDWEISER AND THE WORLD CUP
One of the net’s big successes, in terms of marketing, is as a showcase
for hardware. Cars, computers, camera equipment - they’re all there,
bombarding consumers with branding messages as they browse through the
reams of technical details on offer before making a purchase.
But what of soap powders, chocolate bars and beers - the brands we lob
into our supermarket trolleys without a second thought? Consumers have
little incentive to root around a website for data about them, so the
potential for brand reinforcement would seem poor. That is, of course,
unless you team up with another, more vital, source of information. Then
the results can be quite staggering, as Budweiser discovered during the
World Cup this summer.
Beer, football and the internet. It sounded like the ideal combination,
since all three are the stamping grounds of the much sought-after adult
male. The only the problem was: how could Budweiser remind web users of
its status as an official World Cup partner in a plausible way? The
answer came from its advertising agency, BMP DDB, which suggested
sponsoring the World Cup News site of Sky Sports.
’It wasn’t cheap,’ Chris Rayner, the new media director of BMP
Interaction, admits, ’but it was a lot cheaper than developing a site of
our own.’ It was also phenomenally successful as an awareness-raising
tool. By the end of the championship, research by Sky showed that
Budweiser was the most well-known of the official sponsors of the World
Cup among web users. The research, drawn from around 500 users recruited
from Sky’s other sites, formed part of Budweiser’s site sponsorship
deal. This included cross-promotion with other Sky products. For
example, Budweiser’s trademark logo headed Scoreflash, Sky’s invision
box, which enabled fans to keep up to date with matches while
working.
Budweiser also developed a number of football-oriented computer games
attached to the site. Some games, notably the Budweiser Fruit Machine,
offered the potential for small prizes and could attract valuable user
names and addresses for a consumer database.
However, the thing that most pleased Rayner, by the time the site came
offline, was how web users had begun to feel about the Budweiser brand
itself. Sky research showed that fans did not think the sponsorship a
cynical stunt to cash in on a major event. To them, it was a genuine
move to help Sky fund better coverage of the games. In their eyes, at
least, the Yanks had ridden to the rescue again.
PEUGEOT’S INTEGRATED SITE
Car buyers are a particularly cyber-sensitive lot, it seems. Recent
research in the US, for example, has revealed that one in four car
buyers surf the net for details of prospective car purchases before they
even step into a showroom.
This was a salutary statistic for many car manufacturers. If 25 per cent
of their customers were a good way through their buying decision before
even meeting a sales rep, what was the future for showroom-focused sales
structures?
The answer, according to Peugeot, was to weld the website so tightly to
the sales team that the two work together as an integrated unit. And
that is what the French car giant did when it went live with its site in
April.
The site, developed by Brann Interactive, is directly plugged into
Peugeot’s call response centre in Bristol, which is run by a Brann
sister company. This means that all net-generated leads can be followed
up within 24 hours, and customers can fix exact times for telephone
chats with sales reps and even make appointments for test drives through
their computers. By tying the site to its own database, Peugeot can also
list ’live’ prices for each model on the net. In short, it can provide
all the facilities of a showroom through a computer.
The big test for this internet-linked approach was the launch of
Peugeot’s new model - the 206 - officially unveiled at the Motor Show
this month. For the first time, Peugeot did not confine its pre-launch
hype to direct marketing and PR, but included web activity. What it
found was that as much as 40 per cent of all leads came from internet
sources.
’Peugeot was gobsmacked,’ Tim Beckett, director of Brann Interactive,
explains, ’but very happy.’ Although the site emphasises lead generation
and response handling, Beckett is also keen to point out that it is
strongly branded. It has a number of pages devoted to specific models,
accessories and information on finance and insurance. Each features
Peugeot’s hallmark blue colour and bears the Peugeot logo, as well as
featuring current promotions and images from above-the-line
campaigns.
By the end of the month, the main Peugeot site will have 350 new
additions, each developed for specific dealerships around the country.
These sites will bear a picture of the dealership, a map of how to get
there and details of available stock. The aim? To make punters feel more
at home with Peugeot than any other brand by the time they finally make
their way through the doors of the showroom.
