Manchester United F.C: Marketing strategy of a global brand in Asia

Thèmes abordés

Manchester United F.C., football, club, sport, Ohmae, marché asiatique, Leavy and Wilson, produits dérivés

Résumé du document

If our world can be considered, as Ohmae (1985) explains it, as a global village with “instant communication”, and that football is epi-central to contemporary globalization process (Robertson and Giulanotti, 2004), it can be said that the most valuable football brand is a global brand. Rugman (1986) criticized this fact because he considered football as a more regional than global game due to its position in American society with respect to the women sport, and nowadays “soccer” as it is called in this country is also a men's sport with a MLS championship that brings more and more people in stadiums.

Actually Manchester United is a medium-sized enterprise composed of nearly 600 employees with an annual turnover of circa £300million. But as a service firm, Manchester United operates in each country of the Triad as defined by Ohmae and even in emerging countries. Levitt (1983) said that consumers have worldwide the same tastes. It is also true for football if we consider the hegemony of Manchester United: a community which is a “fandom” of 333 million people (and more than 190 million in Asia) and its 200 branches of Manchester United supporter clubs in 24 countries2. Finally, there is only a lack in South America where the football market is saturated by the very loyal fans of legendary teams like River Plate in Argentina or Santos F.C in Brazil.

Extraits

[...] If Manchester United has become the first football global brand, it is also due do its understanding of fans' needs. Here global fans are viewed as customers and the marketing Forbes Fab 40 : The world most valuable sports brand available on: All Facts and Figures from Manchester United official website : 3 All Facts and Figures from Manchester United financial website http://www.mufplc.com> and Manchester United official financial reports strategy of glocalization, a mid-path between globalization and local marketing is the best way to attract fans from abroad (Quelch and Hoff, 1986). [...]

[...] According to Manchester United Deputy trade marks manager Ben Houston, these counterfeits are even more sold in less-developed areas of Asia: during the 2007 summer tour, they seized £500,000 of counterfeit MU products and only were coming from Hong-Kong, a more developed place where owning an authentic product is the most important for fans. Then, the fandom of Manchester is obviously being more and more global. But Manchester United local fans must not be put on the backburner and the current American owner, Malcolm Glazer, is already criticized. [...]

[...] The question is: How do they win the off-pitch game in Asian market? They focus on strategic marketing, on a long-term view of the marketing-mix (Place, Product, Promotion, Price) and not on one shot marketing operations; and that allows them to create strong brand equity. In order to analyze marketing success of football brands, the conceptual framework of Customer-Based Brand Equity (Keller, 1993) is often used by researchers (Bodet and Chanavat, 2010). This framework is based on four dimensions: Perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand awareness and brand association. [...]

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