Boasting many of football’s all time great players and teams, Brazil boasts a rich history at the elite end of the game, but lower down the league’s some of the country’s clubs are having to be increasingly imaginative when it comes to generating income.
Few clubs have shown more commercial creativity than Fluminense de Feira which is using its player shirt numbers to promote product prices at a local supermarket.
The supermarket’s partnership with the Brazilian fourth-tier side has tweaked shirt sponsorship into a novel tactical price promotion.
This imaginative and unconventional activation initiative used players’ shirt numbers to promote super market pricing during a fixture against Vitoria de Bahia in which shirts numbers pushed special offers on a range of goods from pizza and shaving foam to soda and shampoo.
A product type is written where the player name is usually printed and the footballer’s squad number is replaced with the prices of bargain deals.
Thus, star striker Fernando Sobral didn’t wear his usual Number 10, but instead his shirt bore the number 10,98 (the price of a pizza promotion).
El Fluminense de Feira, de la Serie D brasileña, utiliza los números de las camisetas para publicitar ofertas de un supermercado. pic.twitter.com/jHlcIAtCKb
— David Acebal (@dacebal) April 6, 2017
Another player’s shirt bore the number 20,38 to advertise the cost of shaving cream.
‘Football is very ungrateful to small teams when it comes to the sponsorship issue, we are always looking for new partners, innovations, and this project was developed by one of these partnerships,’ explains club marketing director Xiko Melo
‘In each game, we will bring different offers,’ says Melo, who adds that such measures are needed at clubs like Fluminense de Feira as the Brazilian Football Confederation does little to support football clubs further down the league structure.
‘Football is very ungrateful to small teams on this sponsorship issue,’ he says.
‘You cannot put together a good team without conditions and having a good team requires resources. We had a few sponsors in the beginning, so we decided to have sponsors per game.’
Unfortunately, Fluminense de Feira lost their first match wearing their new shirts: a 6-0 defeat to local rivals Vitoria de Bahia.
Activative Comment:
Shirt sponsorship deals are some of the most expensive sponsorships in global sport.
Barcelona’s recent record breaking deal with Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten is worth around £50m peer season (and will net the club around £200m over the next five years).
But with money tight towards the bottom of Brazil’s football pyramid, any creative means of generating additional income is considered.
This kind of back-of-the-shirt creativity reminds us of the March initiative from the the Swedish women’s football team which recently replaced the names on the back of their kits with empowering messages as part of a campaign intended to inspire women (see case study).
Links:
Fluminense de Feira
http://www.fluminensedefeirafc.com.br/
https://twitter.com/fludefeira_fc?lang=en
https://www.facebook.com/fluminensedefeirafc/
