A marketing guide for brands leveraging the Winter Olympics

2022 is the first time that my country will host the Winter Olympics. As an international event, it has a wide influence around the world.

In addition to competition, it is also a major marketing node for brands. Coinciding with CNY, the traffic and popularity can be said to be able to top the hot search list.

However, looking at the current sports marketing of platforms and brands, it can basically be divided into three categories:

One is to penetrate the minds of users with creativity, usually starting from details and embodying the Olympic spirit through scenario-based stories;

One is to express attitudes, paying tribute to the Olympics through short, powerful copywriting and stories;

Another type is the B-side platform, which emphasizes using traffic to empower brands, and often uses interactive gameplay as the main form.

Although the format has not changed, with users' increasing reliance on mobile devices, especially short videos, brands or platforms often have some deviations when communicating with users. For example, there were very few memorable cases at this year's Tokyo Olympics.

So in the new context, social media environment, social sentiment and CNY node, how can brands use sports marketing to break through the communication circle? Our core focus is on the B-end and C-end.

01. B-side: How to effectively empower brands

The B-end here is mainly based on the platform end that holds the Olympic rights. The platform end wants to empower the brand. The core strategy can basically be divided into three parts. The first part is traffic blessing, the second part is copyright content, and the third part is multi-dimensional extension.

Let’s talk about the traffic blessing first. It goes without saying that international events of this level are very attractive topics. Moreover, this year’s Winter Olympics is held in China. As the host country, the degree of importance it attaches is naturally self-evident. So what power can the platform traffic bring to the brand and how can it empower it?

The first is exposure . Due to the unique rights-holding attributes, users pay more attention to the event, so the overall traffic of the platform will increase significantly. Brands can combine Olympic-related creativity to achieve large-scale exposure through the opening screen, banners, columns, etc., thereby achieving effect conversion.

In addition to this crude way of selling traffic, the platform should also create a methodology that is deeply bound to the brand and combined with the advantages of the Olympics , such as interactive forms such as challenges and solicitations on short video platforms to mobilize the activity of users on the site. This can not only better empower the brand through interaction, but also create brand cases through systematic methodology and expand industry influence.

In addition to soft and hard advertising, the platform should make full use of the copyrighted content of the Olympics, such as live broadcasts of events, information, etc. This is the rigid content for Olympic marketing and is also the core key point for empowering brands.

Tokyo Olympic Games live schedule

On the one hand, watching the Olympics live is a rigid demand, and the atmosphere is particularly important. The platform can then pool its strength to create a companion-style interactive live broadcast, such as gathering idols, champions, etc., to deeply create a companion-style viewing experience. Information categories like can seize marketing heights through hard-core content + platform matrix + innovative products.

On the other hand, the "instant viewing" nature of copyrighted content is a special property of copyright holders. The platform can delve deeply into scarce copyrights, create panoramic Olympic video content, and link multiple resources to provide a three-dimensional viewing experience, thereby efficiently empowering brands.

The third part is multi-dimensional extension, which can be divided into social emotions and group emotions. Social emotions can focus on the highlights of the Olympics, such as Chinese Olympic athletes competing for the country and Chinese Olympic athletes winning gold medals.

What’s important is that the Winter Olympics will be held in China, which can mobilize public sentiment to focus on the Olympic events and thus build reputation for the platform and brand.

Group sentiment is the circle effect. The Winter Olympics is not as large as the Olympics, and ice and snow events are relatively niche. The platform can support the operation of the circle to make it accessible to the public, and then allow brands to join in the effort. The strong combination will help to create an overall brand + circle.

Specific strategies, such as idolizing sports stars, entertaining Olympic content, etc., are essentially opening up topical perspectives in the name of cross-border activities.

02. C-end: How to empower brands through sports marketing

How to empower a brand through sports marketing can be divided into two situations. One is having Olympic copyrights, such as being an official sponsor of the Olympics, and the other is purely taking advantage of the Olympic traffic.

Let’s first look at the brands that have cooperative relationships with the Olympics. There are relatively few such brands, and they are often leading brands in certain fields. For example, the brand sponsors of this year’s Winter Olympics include Tsingtao Beer, Yanjing Beer, Hengyuanxiang, Yuanfudao, etc., and the partners include Yili, Anta, Bank of China, etc.

The biggest advantage of this type of brand is that they can legitimately emphasize the "Olympic" halo, so usually several of these brands will work together with the Olympic platforms, because it is legitimate. The platform has traffic and the brand has content. The brand wants traffic and the platform wants cases, and it is easy to achieve a win-win result in the end. However, for the brands, the cost of doing so will be relatively high.

If the brand does not rely on the platform, the focus of sports marketing should be on IP copyright, events or athletes, greatly strengthening the relationship between IP and brand, taking advantage of the Olympic fever to capture the mind and strengthen cognition, thereby achieving the purpose of sports marketing.

Judging from cases in previous years, brand cases like this with strong IP that can go viral are often based on event marketing and using IP to explain the Olympic spirit or culture, such as the combination of Xiaohongshu and the women's football team, the combination of the women's volleyball team and NetEase, etc.

If a brand does not have Olympic copyright and wants to stand out through sports marketing, it will be extremely challenging for the brand's creativity . Because they don’t have copyright, brands can only start from relatively empty perspectives such as events, hot spots, spirit, culture, etc., which are biased towards value and emotion. It can be said that they have neither traffic blessing nor IP to help, so they can only create popularity by piggybacking.

A good example here is the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Zhiboba proposed "Watch the Olympics, learn Chinese characters", and quickly used homophonic puns to create words and sentences through the hot topic of Olympic athletes winning gold medals.

Although Zhiboba has the copyright for live broadcasting, it is still a good idea for brands to piggyback on it. There is also Oreo's "Sports Gold Challenge", which combines with the Olympics in the form of a challenge game to implant the brand.

Summarize

The B-end platform empowers brands, and its core revolves around "traffic, copyright content, and extended content." What is relatively unconventional here is the extended content, which can serve as a breakthrough for this year's Winter Olympics. After all, ice and snow projects have little attention and the circle has high vertical attributes.

For vertical circles, they can be operated in a refined manner and even go beyond the circle. For the periphery, the circle can be combined with the Olympics to create creative events, which can be said to be very useful.

For the C-end, the core way for a brand to stand out is to bind IP or rely on creative ideas to catch the attention of the public. Binding IP is a strategy used by many big brands, but there are relatively few Winter Olympic teams or athletes, and even fewer well-known ones.

How to get them to work with the brand to enter the traffic center is a test of the brand's early insight. There is a bit of a bet, but compared to pure piggybacking, this bet is at least meaningful. If the bet is right, a small budget can leverage big creativity. If it does not rely purely on piggybacking, it will be difficult to stand out.

Author: Community Marketing Research Institute

Source: Community Marketing Research Institute