Barbara Stopher Blog

Now that the much-hyped England World Cup football team have returned home after their trouncing by the Germans, brands have had to re-evaluate their planned ‘England win’ executional strategies and instead ‘put the boot on’ for the purpose of brand marketing.

Jumping on the Frank Lampard goal that was not given in the England – Germany game because the linesman from Uruguay did not see it, Asda have grasped the marketing opportunity and are offering anyone with a Uruguayan passport a free eye test!

As reported by Marketing, the first two newspaper ads capitalising on the defeat ran the day after the game by two car companies. Kia ran an ad in The Times to promotes their seven-year warranty with the headline “Oh well, at least our warranty beats the Germans”. Nissan chose The Sun to promote its GT-R with the headline “One match the Germans didn’t win”. Read more at http://tinyurl.com/2dznawa

Interestingly, the Nationwide sponsorship of the England team runs out at the end of June, just days after the crushing defeat. Their exclusive renewal period ran out earlier in the year but they claim that the brand is still in talks about the future. At least Sunday’s dire result should have brought the price down if they are still interested!

If not, who else could take up the mantle? Here are just a few of my suggestions but feel free to send me your own:

• An obvious choice would be Avis who could adapt their well-known brand slogan to, ‘We must try harder’
• Or, how about an oil company (topical industry at the moment!?) with Esso’s old slogan ‘Put a Tiger in your Tank’!
• A tea brand makes sense – either the about to be revived Tetley Tea Folk for ‘the Gaffer’ or the PG Tips chimps (needs no further explanation!)
• Or how about Bahlsen’s Messino that is trying to steal share from McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes brand with the slogan ‘the future’s oblong’
• And back to sport, Nike’s brand slogan would sum up what we all think ‘Just do it!’

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 10:02 am and is filed under market analysis, marketing marvels, marketing mistakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.