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How has a sports franchise helped sell risk management and human resource consulting worldwide? It’s a little more involved than simply putting a business name on a team jersey, but when the team happens to be the world’s most popular soccer club, that’s a good place to start.
At the second annual Chicago Booth Emerging Markets Conference, students and faculty gathered to hear from Patrick Pierce, director of global marketing and communications at Aon, a global risk management and human resources consulting firm. Pierce delivered the keynote address for the daylong conference, hosted January 13, 2012, at Harper Center, which focused on the theme “Driving Global Growth: Innovations on the Frontier.”
Pierce discussed how Aon’s sponsorship of the high-profile Manchester United soccer club has helped the company develop business in emerging economies. The English Premier League club, known to fans as the Red Devils, is in its second year of a four-year global partnership and shirt sponsorship contract with Aon. (On the day of the event, Aon announced that it would be relocating its global headquarters from Chicago to London, with Chicago continuing to serve as headquarters for the Americas.)
It helps that Manchester United is one of the world’s best-known sports teams, claiming 333 million fans worldwide, and that the sponsorship puts Aon’s name on the jersey of some of the world’s most famous athletes—including those from countries like South Korea (Ji-sung Park), Mexico (Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez), and Serbia (Nemanja Vidic).
With some 88 million fans watching televised matches each week, “It’s as if the Aon brand was being featured in a Super Bowl game 40 times a year with no commercial interruptions,” said Pierce, putting the sponsorship into perspective for members of the audience.
Pierce outlined three objectives that Aon sought with their sponsorship: uniting the firm’s 60,000 global colleagues through enthusiasm for the sport, maximizing the efficiency of money invested to promote the brand, and growing the company’s business in emerging markets.
“Although Aon’s sponsorship is global,” Pierce said, “we needed local touch points” to better personalize their marketing in specific regions. It was important to Aon to engage its colleagues and involve their families in these marketing efforts, so the company started by building pride from within, hosting events like match-watching parties and holding contests for the children of employees to design a Manchester United jersey.
Prior to the Manchester United sponsorship deal, Aon’s marketing focus was scattered across more than 100 countries, and introduction into new markets was expensive. Research showed that the firm had low brand recognition in countries targeted for growth, which made delivering Aon’s services a challenge.
By consolidating its marketing dollars into the ManU sponsorship, Aon has actually increased brand recognition. With more than 70 percent of visitors to Manchester United’s website coming from outside the UK, including huge spikes from Asia immediately following matches, Aon’s brand recognition is also now growing worldwide.
Of course, brand awareness in emerging markets is one thing, and activating in those markets is another. It starts with employees: in India, Aon, like other companies, had a staggeringly high attrition rate, making it difficult either to instill any pride in employees or to build the Aon brand.
After they began sponsoring Manchester United, however, Aon made a name for itself in India, becoming a credible firm that people wanted to work for and increasing brand recognition in an emerging market. The company also used incentives here to drive employee interest in and loyalty to their sponsored brand: two employees in one of the Indian offices won a trip to Switzerland to watch a ManU match and meet Wayne Rooney, the team’s celebrated striker.
“Those two employees are now local heroes,” Pierce said.
Aon’s market research shows that their sponsorship has more than paid off. Now their brand is better recognized in emerging markets including Mexico, Hong Kong, India, and China—the latter boasts some 110 million ManU fans alone.
Aon, Pierce indicated, believe it will go far in these emerging markets. One of the metrics Pierce showed the audience measured business decision makers who are aware of Aon’s sponsorship versus those who are unaware. In each category, Aon asked questions such as whether respondents would consider Aon products, whether they believed that Aon has strong service capabilities. For nearly all questions, those who were aware of Aon’s sponsorship of Manchester United responded more favorably toward the company.
“We will never be considered for business if we’re not known,” Pierce said during the question and answer period following his keynote.
Full-Time MBA Program student Ben Mactiernan said that he followed soccer regularly while living in Asia, where getting together to watch matches was part of the culture. “I thought it was a very interesting strategy from an internal marketing point of view. I see a lot of value in that. I’ve always wondered how a sports team can promote a business brand… and it was interesting to see some of the strategy around that.”
The conference was organized by the professional student organization Emerging Markets Group (EMG), and sponsored by International Finance Corporation, a World Bank group.
—Laura M. Browning