FIFA World Cup

It’s was no surprise that the momentum took place and heated up for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. This particular tournament is the world’s largest and most-watched sporting event with 30 billion viewers over the course of the event. From a business standpoint, it’s the most important platform for sporting goods companies to market their brands. Brands are appealing to boost their profile and sales by tapping into the passion surrounding the World Cup, but while some are official sponsors, others are just benefiting from any desirable side effect.
Football was a game played between two teams of 11 players each, 10 field players and a goalkeeper per team. The game lasted 90 minutes, consisting of two 45-minute halves of running time. It was played with an oval ball, on a rectangular grass field with a goal on either end. Excluding the goalkeeper, the ball was controlled only with the feet, legs, torso and head (the use of hands or arms was prohibited) and the team scoring the most goals by the end of the game was the winner.
Football was the most popular sport in the world, by both viewership and participation, and was continuing to grow. In 2006, Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international governing body for football, estimated that 265 million people worldwide played football, up from 242 million in 2000. Professional leagues existed throughout the world, though the top talent and most popular clubs were in Western Europe, concentrated in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. Since the early 1990’s professional team rosters in Western Europe had become increasingly globalized, with stars from South America, Africa and Asia playing in the top leagues.
The World Cup, FIFA’s flagsh...

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...g on the biggest stage in football, with billions of people around the world are watching. How can we analyze how a company can best integrate several value propositions into a solid plan and how it can best communicate with its chosen target market? It will also allow discussion of the brand image the company needs to portray to leverage success beyond the World Cup event.
If you are a small brand like Bavaria FIFA come down like a ton of bricks, but if you are a well-known brand like Nike or even Carlsberg nothing happens. Are FIFA bullies taking on the weak brands they know they can boss about, or are the big brands more clever in how they operate?

Works Cited

http://www.mrlukeabbott.com/tag/ambush-marketing/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/face-to-face/2010/04/22/nike-adidas-and-the-world-cup/ http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2010/06/money-and-the-world-cup.html