Sports and snacks go hand in hand, and Mondelēz International has a wealth of experience with both. For the World Cup this summer, the food and beverage giant is leveraging its portfolio of products and its athlete partners to get people snacking.
Sports fans are no stranger to Mondelēz snacks: It has flexed brands like Oreo and Ritz Crackers during major American sporting events including the Super Bowl and March Madness, typically tapping high-profile athletes and celebrities as spokespeople.
While the World Cup is a standout event given its global scale, Mondelēz’s “Summer of Soccer” campaign will stick to that same strategy of talent-focused marketing to drive sales and brand equity, according to Nick Rogers, director of portfolio marketing at Mondelēz International.
“With the World Cup being in the US and it being the biggest sporting event on the planet, we needed to really show up big as a brand,” Rogers told Marketing Brew. “Mondelēz has a rich heritage—whether that be [with] athletes, male and female, and, in addition to that, sporting teams and sporting federations—so I feel we can really show up in a really confident way this summer.”
Bark and bite
For its World Cup campaign—which includes TV spots, a sweepstakes, and limited-edition packaging—the Mondelēz team went for the “most dynamic, well-known, entertaining talent out there,” Rogers said. The lineup of partners consists of USMNT forward Christian Pulisic, USWNT forward Sophia Wilson, former USWNT co-captain Alex Morgan, and Pitbull.
There’s an obvious outlier on the list, which is intentional. While the soccer stars lend Mondelēz certain “credentials in the sporting world,” Pitbull contributes to a more general sense of entertainment that Rogers said his team was looking to foster.
“This is the US,” he said. “It’s about fun, it’s about entertainment, it’s about going big…so we felt bringing in Pitbull from that element really will help have that mass appeal.”
Pitbull and the players are also involved in a sweepstakes Mondelēz is running that offers grand-prize winners access to talent-driven experiences, like a skills class with Pulisic, a tour of the San Diego Wave FC stadium with Morgan, a meditation session with Wilson, and a meet and greet with Pitbull and tickets to one of his shows. Throughout the summer, Mondelēz will roll out limited-edition packs of Chips Ahoy, Ritz, Sour Patch Kids, Swedish Fish, and Belvita to promote the competition and the sweepstakes.
Snack attack
The Mondelēz team has three key goals for its World Cup marketing efforts. The first is “making sure our products are front of mind and driving that impulse purchase” at a national level, Rogers said. His team is also taking a regional approach to driving sales in host cities, like promoting Pitbull in his home market of Miami, and Morgan, who was born in and played in California, on the West Coast. Mondelēz recently reported a YoY profit decline in the fourth quarter due to higher costs of cocoa, although its revenue beat analyst estimates.
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Brand equity is the second KPI, Rogers added, and the third is “being bespoke at scale with our consumer,” which his team aims to achieve via the sweepstakes. Grand-prize winners have their choice of athletes and experiences, and additional winners will get access to prizes like signed jerseys, which they can also choose based on their fandom, Rogers said.
“Giving those options and that flexibility to our consumer is really what makes us different from our competitors,” he said.
After this year’s World Cup, Rogers said his team plans to pull the same general campaign concept through to the Women’s World Cup in Brazil next year, and ultimately to LA28, while fostering long-term relationships with its existing athlete partners—from the soccer players to USC basketball star JuJu Watkins—to connect with a wide range of consumers.
“The talent is what does the talking,” he said. “For us, it’s just about making sure we’ve got this key group of individuals that we stick with.”
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