Britvic and PepsiCo’s launching of a £5 million Gatorade advertising campaign recently didn’t pass us by – in case you were wondering. No, we were playing our usual game of “what if?” So, lets get to it…here’s what we’d have planned if PepsiCo had chosen us to handle the Gatorade campaign.
Sports drinks formed £154 million of the UK drinks market in 2007 (up 16% on the previous year) and we would seek to capitalise on this burgeoning popularity with involvement in high-profile sporting activities as a cornerstone of our campaign.
To this end we would pursue two different promotional avenues. Firstly, we would seek to have an overt and powerful presence at major sporting events. Ideally this presence would take the form of both sponsorship and entertainment based events.
Away from professional sport, we’d seek to implement grass roots sponsorship of local sporting teams and events to highlight a commitment to an active and healthy population.
On that front too, we’d seek to draw attention to Gatorade’s lack of artificial ingredients (yes, you heard right) with a series of events designed to educate.
So, with that overview out of the way – where to start?
High-profile sports events and their sponsorship are rather self-evident in any major sports drink campaign, so we won’t bother going into that too much…besides, options there are also rather limited and avenues pursuable low in numbers so consequently not particularly interesting in the context of this article!
We see the more interesting part of the campaign lying in the promotion, sponsorship and creation of strong community sporting initiatives.
We would start our campaign off with touring roadshows featuring well-known sportsmen and women. Here young and old alike would have the chance to try out various sports under the tutelage of professionals, take entertaining and informative fitness tests and find out where, in their local area, they could join a club to regularly enjoy the various sports included in the roadshow. In each place that the roadshow stopped attendees would vote for the most popular local sports club (from a nominated list – these clubs having been canvassed in preparatory work some time previously) and the winner would receive a serious injection of sponsorship money from Gatorade to help with new facilities, equipment and, hopefully, new members.
We would also seek to put Gatorade’s name to a series of local sporting competitions (and we’d be looking for a variety of sports too – we wouldn’t want our focus to be too narrow) to create a definable community image. This would be furthered by our efforts to publicise Gatorade’s healthy qualities and lack of additives.
To further this aspect of the campaign – and highlight Gatorade’s suitability for young athletes – we would run a national competition to find the “best” school sports team in the country. The competition would be based not on results but on the abilities of school teams to fundraise for local communities – thus, once again, attaching Gatorade’s name to community development.
The winners of this competition would receive a high-profile and lavish trip to the next truly major international sporting competition – hopefully the campaign would be timed to coincide with the Football World Cup, but if not there are plenty of other options!
We feel that the truly intelligent part of our campaign would be in our decision not to excessively publicise our community efforts and to state that we would be ploughing the resultant saved revenue back into those same communities. We would state that this is because the pursuit of sport within the community is one of the single greatest unifying efforts within modern society. We would dub this the “Gatorade Crusade” and seek to involve other organisations and even the UK government in continued efforts. Handled like this, we believe we would soon have a word of mouth campaign on the grandest scale in operation.
Gatorade would then forever be associated with social and sporting development within Britain’s local communities – and that would be priceless.