Jakes Marketing Blog
For my marketing blog, I wanted to talk about Budweiser in the World Cu
p. This was very interesting to me because of the ability a country has while hosting a world event to change rules on the spot.
The World Cup is arguably the most popular and important sporting event in the world. Every four years a country gets to host this incredible tournament, spending billions in order to have this event in Qatar. For 36 years and over nine world cups, Budweiser has been the official World Cup beer sponsor. This level of exposure to a product is in the billions of people, making planning and advertising critical in executing the perfect plan in exposing their product the most affectively.
When in the World Cup, a country who is hosting has all the ability to set rules and expectations for people potentially coming to watch in person. This being said Qatar at the last minute decided to forbid the consumption and distribution of Budweiser Beer in or around the stadium. This puts years and years of planning for the month long tournament down the drain. Budweiser now completely at a stand still, however with the power of social media Budweiser tweeted "well this is awkward" after quickly deleting the tweet. This followed with millions of shares and screen shots, and gave the brand a huge advantage in this unfortunate marketing turn up. As people share the tweet and begin to talk, Budweiser states they are proud to follow all state and country rules and regulations, as they would promote all zero alcohol Budweiser beer.
As the sale of the Budweiser beer was not allowed they were able to change the slogan saying "bring home the bud" as they announced a "celebration on us, granting the winning country getting the 5 million some dollars worth of inventory in beer. This drastically increased the talk of the brand and kept people promoting for free on social media and word of mouth. However losing upwards of 5 million dollars, Budweiser was able to turn the loss of sale of their beer, into a gigantic source of advertising and was able to turn nothing into something.
To me this was the best thing Budweiser could have done. With the non ability to sell to millions over the month long Tournament, the social media take over was needed. As time changes I notice a huge portion of sports enthusiasts and even casual fans use social media to voice there opinion on a play call, or how they feel about the games, Budweiser saw that and took advantage of the World Cup heavy traffic on social media and it worked perfectly.
How Budweiser Salvaged World Cup
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