UK retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S), which has been the official suit supplier to The Football Association and the England men’s team since 2007, ran a responsive World Cup campaign around the knock-out stages leveraging manager Gareth Southgate’s famous waistcoat.
Southgate’s smart and ‘lucky’ waistcoat, from M&S, went social after the England manager wore it throughout Russia 2018 and became something of a fan meme.
This was partly driven by the fans and the media attributing a great deal of England’s Russia 2018 success to the Southgate effect: in reference to the manager’s honest, straight forward and seemingly unusually human approach to his job which has helped generate unity and trust within the team and helped the fans re-connect with the national team.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, M&S was quick to respond to waistcoat-loving England fans and began updating its social media accounts with posts relevant to their official FA waistcoat.
Following England’s 2-0 quarter final win over Sweden, M&S posted a waistcoat piece of marketing content on Instagram which has gained over 20,000 likes.
This traction served to increase the hype around the clothes piece and so for the semi-final the brand rolled out a series of social pieces – including a consumer competition as well as good luck messaging – leveraging the #WaistcoatWednesday #Luckywaistcoast and #ComingHome hashtags.
This activation strand also included a Facebook Fan Filter tool,
and a fan competition to further drive waistcoat sharing.
The brand’s activation came to a close with a final congratulatory execution.
Comment:
England might have lost to Coatia, but Marks and Spencer made sure it still had something to cheer about on #WaistcoatWednesday
This World Cup has been dominated by responsive work and low latency activation leveraging events as close to as possible to real-time.
This is a prime example of how nimble, tactically astute brands can keep abreast of trends and memes and leverage them in their marketing if they have an authentic reason to do so.
Indeed, during the tournament the retailer saw waistcoat demand increase by a whopping 35%.
Button up!
Links:
Marks & Spencer
https://www.marksandspencer.com/
https://twitter.com/marksandspencer
