Reaping the benefits of raising brand awareness in a worldwide illustrious tournament such as the World Cup cannot go unnoticed. Despite the huge sums involved in World Cup sponsorships – FIFA raised more than $1bn from global brands in 2010 – questions remain about how best to derive maximum marketing value from the tournament. The World Cup is a four-week frenzy when brands fight for consumers’ attention, so achieving cut-through during the event is a difficult task for all marketers especially in a world where we are overthrown and overloaded with excessive information.

Guerilla marketing is one creative way for brands to engage with their target audiences through placing advertising messages that aim to create a memorable impression on the eyes of the beholder. Not only does Guerilla marketing increase the brand perception but it also creates a social buzz that of raises awareness, especially where so many luxury brands are clamoring to get everyone’s attention during the World Cup. By placing advertising in non-traditional mediums, advertisers ‘blur the boundary between the advertised message and its surrounding content making it more difficult for consumers to identify advertising as advertising as it is made less irritating and disrupting of the content.’

A contemporary brand that is successfully implementing Guerrilla marketing during the World Cup is German auto giant Audi, who with the start of the World Cup switched on the lights in its monumental installation on the Brooklyn waterfront, called the “scoreboard”. This 40 foot high LED “scoreboard” uses 28 showroom-new Audi A8 luxury cars to ingeniously display all of the World Cup results; each individual A8 sits inside an open-ended shipping container as the cars’ headlights broadcast football results to New Yorkers from across the East River in Brooklyn. The structure is assembled to form two massive “8” configurations that resemble a digital clock and the estimated cost of this construction is to be around $2.1m.

“Scoreboard” highlights Audi’s dedication to get in on the action and the buzz that surrounds the World Cup. Through this Guerilla campaign, Audi aims to increase its brand perception and awareness, blending its unique passion of German engineering and committed interest in football that has been embedded in the brands’ core values: Audi AG has been a partial owner of FC Bayern since 2002. It is more important to understand however, that Audi doesn’t necessarily need to increase its brand awareness in a market that it already dominates. Even though it can strongly be argued that it can enhance its illustrious position in the US Market, it’s more imperative to recognize that Audi is striving to spread the football culture within the US that is evidently behind other mainstream sports. Audi’s press statement proclaims that the display “will bring the excitement of world-class soccer to NYC.”

Through this unconventional marketing campaign, Audi aims to attract the attention of Americans who have not in the past been exposed to such imaginative solutions to promote football and, more specifically, the World Cup. Formulating a promotion as captivating and interesting as this one, Audi wants to engage emotionally with its audience, aiming to evoke senses of infatuation and excitement. Aspiring to shift the perception of football, Audi is eager to get people to participate in the World Cup hype that is everywhere in the World. Everywhere except in one of the world’s biggest countries where the word football is explicitly associated with another sport.

The whole idea of guerrilla marketing is to get the consumer to interact with the product in a way that is unexpected yet memorable. Audi successfully implements this strategy to get the US population to interact both with its cars and the World Cup hype; giving a brand a new angle and positive energy that traditional advertising is not capable of offering. Whether this campaign will help the US population to make more effort to follow football remains to be unseen, but Audi is surely hitting two birds with one stone and shedding light on the World Cup, quite literally.

By: Burak Serin

Influenced by the article “How Audi Created the World’s Biggest World Cup Scoreboard” by Robert Klara

In this century of enormous transformation, brands are increasingly aware of, the need to be proactive and establish themselves online in order to escape the consequences of falling behind and lose their competitive advantages. This impact of technology, particularly on content-based products like recorded music and books, is all too clear. The demise of Woolworths – once one of the UK’s largest music retailers – and the difficulties currently being experienced by HMV are perhaps the most poignant examples of how the Internet and digital technology has contributed to changing shopping habits and the retail landscape.

What many retailers nowadays are failing to understand however, is how physical brick-and-mortar stores are still as important as entering the digital landscape. This becomes vital in an era where customer service quality can be the difference for brands seeking to gain an edge over their competitors. Given that more and more people are migrating online, a crucial part of retaining their interest is to offer them the best experience possible in a real-world setting. The new wave of retail stores that thrive on delivering this superior customer service is through conveying an emotive brand experience in what LS:N Global calls ‘The Tomorrow Store’.

Accordingly, this concept explains the change towards delivering customer service through an almost theatrical experience, where retailers are aiming to engage with all of consumers’ five sense in their physical retail stores. That way, by engaging with your customers through an experience, a positive emotional ambiance is created where customers feel involved and an element of fun becomes embedded. This consequently leads the shopping experience to be an engaging and memorable one where brand loyalty can be established.

Great examples of experiential led retail offers have been appearing in shopping destinations over the last couple of years. Apple, which actively encourages consumers to play with their products and offers free workshops to help familiarize potential customers with software products, is perhaps one of the most obvious. In fashion retail there’s youth brands like Hollister, where shop front design, store layout, lighting, music and staff presentation are carefully managed to provide a consistent expression of the brand. Infiniti, Nissan’s luxury vehicle brand, evokes emotion and a sense of excitement when customers are introduced to their brand new car by letting them pull the covers off it, for the big reveal.

More contemporary and innovative examples are set to further revolutionise retailing, most remarkably in the new state-of-the-art Terminal 2 at London Heathrow Airport. According to Airports Council International, income from shoppers makes up 34%, on average, of an airport’s overall turnover. This figure becomes pivotal in getting the retail strategy correct for Heathrow’s new terminal as it expects to welcome 30 million passengers every year. Through its modern architecture and design cues, such as ‘a ceiling-high glass wall that provides a window on to the runway and additional natural light streams’, Heathrow encourages brands to experiment with new retail concepts that challenge the service design principle and status quo.

Adidas, a prominent brand of the 21st century, is capitalizing on this opportunity through its new wave of ‘Home Court’ stores that is set to transform the entire complexion of brick-and-mortars. The idea behind Home Court is to engage customers with more breath and depth of the Adidas brand than ever before where “the store has the look and feel of an arena, with the entrance resembling the tunnel players use to emerge on to a sports field”. The brand experience is further augmented by interactive touch-screens that allow shoppers to search online for products that meet their needs. Ultimately, Home Court stores pioneer a truly interactive retail experience that evokes all senses and emotion that revolutionizes service design and delivery.

Launched earlier this year in Beijing, Adidas has already brought the concept to the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent last month and it is set to take its place in Heathrow’s brand new Terminal 2. Unquestionably, the terminal will accommodate Home Court stores perfectly with a highly intuitive, ‘bright, open-plan layout … designed to help passengers navigate the terminal more easily’. This enables a great visual connection that will almost guarantee maximum exposure to Home Court and the Adidas brand.

Conceptualizing an interactive experience that is delivered inside the physical contours of a brick-and-mortar outlet, modern concepts like Home Court will drive the ‘Tomorrow Store’, combining both worlds of online and offline retail. Thomas Pink and Yo! Sushi are other early adopter brands that have jumped on this bandwagon and have started incorporating technology into their stores. Understanding the value of technology in people’s lives, Thomas Pink utilizes large touch-screen tables in its outlets, enabling customers to design their personalized garments and have them made and delivered to them anywhere in the world. Food giant Yo! Sushi meanwhile, is pioneering a mobile ordering system, allowing customers to order their food from their smart-phone app, transforming the service experience.

Ultimately, it is not difficult to understand that these changes and developments are collectively contributing to a new dimension of delivering a first-class customer service through innovative and emotional pioneered retail solutions. It would be naive to think that online retailers that offer more flexibility and convenience will completely replace brick-and-mortars when nothing comes close to a physical store to provide the real retail experience in the real world.

Importantly, it is paramount to grasp that bland, generic store experiences are no longer enough to lure customers of today. The ‘Tomorrow Store’ has to be social, emotive, and theatrical in engaging all senses at all touch points of the brand experience. Significantly, this has to be coupled with innovation, delivering an interactive shopping experience as technology unavoidably surrounds our everyday lives and will continue to do so in ways that are unimaginable.

The ‘Tomorrow Store’ is here today, and before technology makes it the yesterday store, it is time for brands to take action and transform their retail and service designs to successfully convey a world-class brand experience within their brick-and-mortar outlets that will serve the emotional needs of customers and be instrumental in establishing brand loyalty in the long run.

By: Burak Serin

Influenced by the Article ‘Service Design is Revolutionizing Retail’ (Marketing Week, 2014)

Adidas Group Chief Sales Officer Consumer Direct, Michael Stainer, speaks about the plans for Home Courts European roll-out: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIp0R4LXT2A#t=284