Between January and July 2019 official UEFA tournament automotive partner Kia activated its rights to the first UEFA Europa League Trophy Tour (Driven By Kia) with a community cause focused initiative which collected unwanted football boots from European fans and donated them to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
Territory: Europe/Global
Agency: Right Formula, Dugout
Background
As well as the ‘Trophy Tour’, Kia UEFA Europa League three-year partnership (which was announced in September 2018) sees the auto brand have rights to the rights-owner and tournament marks and assets, at-match branding, ticketing and hospitality, plus the ‘match ball carrier’ programme and UEFA’s online game – the UEL Daily Fantasy,
The deal adds to Kia’ sports sponsorship portfolio which in football also includes the FIFA World Cup, the UEFA European Championship and the Copa América. As well as properties in other sports such as the Australian Open tennis championship.
Objectives
Amongst the key challenges facing the global auto industry is the issue of climate change: the environmental damage caused by motor vehicles and the increasingly negative public perception around the sector due to negative ecology and social impact.
Kia’s Europa League partnership deal with UEFA for the tournament started in the 2018/19 season and will run through to the 2020/21 season and it includes hosting a Trophy Tour during the knockout stages of the competition.
Nissan chose to focus its Trophy Tour activation on enhancing its brand positioning and perception within this context by placing a cause-based project at the core of the campaign to:
> Raise awareness of Kia’s UEL sponsorship
> Increase Kia brand sentiment
The idea was that by creating a boot donation platform for fans to give their old, unwanted football boots to those in less fortunate circumstances and with a greater need and use for them Kia would gain sufficient credibility and authenticity to be able to talk to consumers in general and football fans in particular about the steps the brand is taking to drive positive societal change.
Thus the Trophy Tour activation aimed to help address negative category and/or brand sentiment.
The activation also set out to bring to life Kia’s UEFA sponsorship mission statement of ‘Empowering Fans’, create longer-term CSR ‘ownership’ around Europe League sponsorship which would be a point of difference compared to other official UEFA tournament partners and other trophy tour activations.
Plus, due to the multi-market nature of the tour, Kia tasked its team to create an initiative which had universal appeal, which transcended language and which appealed to European football fan altruism.
Activation
During the strategy phase ahead of the activation itself, Kia established a research group to investigate the problems surrounding lack of football footwear.
The research team found that around 300m people around the globe don’t have adequate access to football footwear.
The team discovered that in 2017 23 billion pairs of sports shoes were produced, while in Europe alone more than 3 billion pairs are thrown away every year.
(Indeed, the team found that 82% of Europeans own a pair of shoes that they have never even worn.)
The problem is a serious one: after all, the industry estimates that between the ages 4 and 16 kids need an average of 28 pairs of shoes as their feet grow and when this is considered alongside the fact that the average price of a new pair of trainers is €52 the cost barrier to access is substantial.
Kia estimated that at least 15m people around the world play football without appropriate footwear and so set out to do something about this problem.
Thus, with the objective of providing practical, community-focused football support, instead of simply leveraging its Trophy Tour sponsorship rights to offer supporters to see the trophy, Kia teamed up with The UEFA Foundation For Children (the rights owner’s charitable arm) to set up a pan-European football boot collection initiative which encouraged fans to donate unwanted boots which were taken to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
The 2019 iteration of the Trophy Tour began in Switzerland and included eight country stops as the cup travelled a total of 14,890 miles through England, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Spain – collecting football boots all along the route.
The mechanic and tactics used to incentivise fans to donate their boots ?.
The aim was thus to encourage fans to visit stops along the Trophy Tour route and donate their unwanted football boots or trainers
The concept of a ‘tour’ enabled the auto brand to craft the project as a ‘journey’ which was further boosted by the vehicles showcased (and participating markets provided Kia vehicles for display and for use by brand ambassadors throughout the duration of the Trophy Tour).
To incentivize each fan to participate, Kia ensured that for every pair of boots donated the donor was entered into a prize draw to win a pair of VIP tickets to the 2019 Europa League Final in Baku.
This top prize was available to a winner in each of market.
The activation focused on a trio of elements:
City centre – experiential pop-ups in high footfall areas
Schools & amateur clubs – assembly presentations and training sessions
Kia dealerships – in-store campaign point-of-sale display and digital support, merchandise and content, plus boot collection points
At each of these people has a chance to see the Trophy up close, interact with brand ambassador football legends and to donate their football boots in person.
The football icon ambassadors – Deco, David Seaman, Eidur Gudjohnsen, Lothar Matthaus, Andres Palop, Filippo Inzaghi, Andrey Arshavin and Youri Djorkaeff – all also donated their own boots.
Even UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin personally donated a pair of his football boots.
The initiative’s marketing and communications was managed centrally and led by a spearhead video and supporting photography amplified across Kia, dealer, UEFA and ambassador digital and social channels and across media platforms operated by Dugout.
This phase was supported through toolkits and localised content sent to each markets, plus local market PR work with media.
Outcome
According to Kia and its tem, the community impact of the initiative was two-fold: in each market that hosted a Trophy Tour activation fans enthusiastically donated their footwear to those in less fortunate (particularly at schools and grassroots clubs where senior figures and influencers (such as parents, teachers and coaches) help drive donations) and the effect of these donations at Zaatari was powerful.
Plus, of course, Nissan consolidated its brand objectives through content created and distributed at the climax of the campaign.
The brand and its marketing partners reported that the campaign measured successfully against objectives: headline by the fact that more than 1000 pairs of football boots were donated (beating its initial, pre-campaign target of 500).
In terms of social reach, the campaign engaged more than 28 million people across Kia’s own channels, as well as those belonging to UEFA, the brand ambassador platforms and Dugout channels.
500-+ user-generated social media posts were generated with the campaign hashtags #UELTrophyTour and #DrivenByKia
In total 8,400 visitors attended the four city pop-up in London, Moscow, Seville and Berlin.
The initiative also generated at least 60 pieces of editorial.
Independent analysis of the fan experience part of the project from mystery shopping service ‘Mole in a Minute’ reported strong levels of both consumer excitement and understanding of the boot donation messaging and collection processes and mechanics.
Furthermore, Kia had identified a set of areas of improvement to build on the first year of the initiative: such as adding on-site data capture and fan behaviour/movement tracking tools for the 2020 Trophy Tour.
The campaign will continue next year and help to further address the challenge and the UEFA Foundation for Children advise that there is a requirement for up to 10,000 pairs of football boots at the Zaatari camp.
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