Lessons Brands Can Learn from the 2019 Rugby World Cup

While it's been over a week since our 2019 Rugby World Cup victory, the actions of the team will inspire our proud nation for years to come. The Springboks are arguably the most popular brand in South Africa right now and this had me thinking about the successful brand strategy tips they deployed. I jotted those thoughts down in this article. Read on to discover 4 lessons brands can learn from the Boks!

1. Have a message that drives purpose

Purpose-driven content marketing is a way for brands to bond with a target audience based on their shared needs, interests and values – including interest in supporting worthy causes. Purpose driven marketing is everything right now with 62% of customers wanting companies to take a stand on current and relevant issues. This is especially the case for millennials and gen Z.

The Springbok’s #strongertogether hashtag perfectly illustrates a purpose driven message. The team understood what their audience desires, beyond sports, and they used their influential platform to address this while spreading positivity, togetherness and hope.

Their storytelling on and off the pitch reflected purpose too. It was clear that they were fighting for far more than the trophy and THIS was a force that couldn’t be reckoned with. The humbling stories they told also increased their likeability as a team. People outside of South Africa were rooting for the Bok’s and there’s no doubt that the positive brand reputation they were building on helped stop the little criticism they may have received from going to their heads.

2. Your community are influencers in their own right

Did you know that over the past 90 days, there was a whopping 748,000 mentions of the Bok’s #strongertogether hashtag across social media platforms? Meltwater’s analysis also revealed that England lost off the pitch too, with a sorry (not sorry) 61,000 mentions during the same period.

#strongertogether hashtag engagement across all social media platforms

#carrythemhome hashtag engagement across all social media platforms

South Africa’s huge amount of community engagement had me pondering… I wonder how many brands attempt to leverage their audience to drive awareness and sales before paying influencers to do it?

As influencers become more available and proven, brand budget has flooded into the space. In fact, 65% of marketers said they’ll increase their spending on influencer marketing this year, up from 39% in 2018. Perhaps this is a contributing factor as to why some brands are forgetting about the influence of their audience?

I’m not saying there’s no place for influencer marketing - because there certainty is, but rather, if budget is tight, think about influencers differently. If it’s solely brand awareness that you’re after, macro influencers with large following have the reach – but the caveat is they’re expensive to work with. If you’re looking to drive sales, your customers have the trust needed to influence purchases. Recommendations from family and friends are five times more influential than celebrities when they are making a purchase decision. And more often than not, brand advocates don’t need paying as they’re happy to promote your brand off their own backs.

“Ask yourself, do you deem a celebrity with high reach but 5 times less trust more important to work with than a brand advocate that has little reach, but five times more trust? Just because somebody has little reach, it doesn’t mean they’re less important, you only need to look at the rise of micro-influencers to see that.”

Audiences are influencers in their own right and brands need to start thinking more smartly about how they’re amplifying them. Here are my top tips to drive audience and advocate engagement:

• Invest in a social media community manager: learn more about their role here
• Use media intelligence tools to find your advocates: learn more about doing this here
• Don't underestimate the importance of social proof, build trust by asking for referrals and testimonials
• Use audience data to understand what they care about and start conversations around this: learn more about audience data here

3. Keep trying and drive conversions via benchmarking

As the Springbok’s will tell you, conversions don’t come easy. Blood sweat and tears goes into a winning strategy and sometimes that means getting involved in humbling experiences, like failing and taking the time to reflect on past errors.

Rassie Erasmus understands the importance of reflection, at the end of each game, he gathers the team to debrief and discuss the good, bad and ugly of how they played. While the Springboks were beaten by New Zealand in the opening week, they used this experience to do better. “That first defeat was a great lesson for us,” Erasmus said. “The whole week was terrible and that taught us a lot about how we should handle the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final.”

“Benchmarking the results of your past campaign against where you and your competitors currently stand is key to driving growth. Afterall, you can’t become number 1 if you don’t know what number 1 looks like.”

Depending on the type of key performance indicators (KPIs) you’re measuring, it’s wise to reflect and benchmark on a weekly, quarterly or annual basis. Benchmarking will help you move the needle by better understanding and doing more of what’s working and pausing what’s not.

The good news is that this is a simple process with Meltwater. Our customers can build a media benchmark report in the click of a button or view live dashboards if they prefer to keep their finger on the pulse of the media and industry in real time.

 A benchmark of engagement for #strongertogether vs #carrythemhome hashtags across all social media platforms

4. Build a diverse squad and think critically about the skills you need

In the world of rugby, it’s not necessarily the sharpest, smartest, fittest, fastest or strongest team that wins, it’s having that perfect cocktail of all the desired winning skills.

When building or growing your marketing team, consider the current strengths and weaknesses in your squad so you can either play to them or plug the gap. There’s no use in employing more people just like you and your existing workforce, in order to move forward, your team needs a well-rounded skillset. The challenge is, however, is that the winning skillset is changing…

“Following a string of Chief Marketing Offer (CMO) resignations this year from brands such as McDonalds, Unilever, Uber and Johnson & Johnson, there’s a dark undertone sweeping across the marketing industry that the ‘death of the CMO is nigh.’”

Currently 70% of Fortune 500 brands have a CMO, but the proportion is falling as leading businesses rethink the role, either scrapping it altogether or folding it into new job titles including Chief Growth Officer. We’re seeing a trend where companies are consolidating marketing duties with executives who have broader mandates that often include sales and commercial functions such as product development, retail oversight and more. This has resulted in the growth of hybrid roles that are part marketing, part sales, part product, part tech and part consumer advocate.

Personally, I don’t think this means that CMOs are being released, but rather they’re being rebranded while leaders try to make sense of what marketing really means in this new digital era. One thing that is sure, however, is that as boundaries and responsibilities continue to blur, would-be CMOs have to think more broadly about the skills they and their team need to win. Part of this means having:

• Greater financial accountability for the performance of brands
• A more prominent role in overseeing transformation agendas
• Breaking down silos and working more closely with all key functions across the business
• Creating customer-centric strategies, driven by data rather than intuition
• Greater flexibility and agility
• Understanding both internal and external forces

Outside of work, the Bok’s are inspirations to many, but hopefully this article has also sparked some ideas around how you can bring your love for the game into the workplace too!

Want to learn more about building messages that resonate, increasing audience engagement, benchmarking to increase conversions or developing the critical skills needed for the marketer of the future? Direct message me on LinkedIn, let’s chat!