Unique Curve of Olympic Marketing
-- Estimation based on 4 key points of OP index

The Olympics are in full swing，heating up the Olympic atmosphere which is definitely good news for all of the Olympic sponsors. All the sponsors have made tremendous preparations and concentrated their efforts to excel in the Olympic marketing competition. Most of them started their work 2 to 3 years ago, and they have worked as hard as the athletes preparing for the Olympic games. CSM Media Research’s (in cooperation with R3) Olympic Sponsorship Benchmarking survey has completed 8 wave of research creating a database with more than 12,000 face to face interviewers, investigating the impact of Olympic Marketing. Our analysis has shown a unique relationship among the 4 OP (Olympic Performance) criteria; these 4 key points are “Olympic sponsorship awareness, promotional recall, Olympic Values and purchase intent.”

These 4 key criteria are the basis for the Olympic sponsorship performance index and our statistical analysis has found these 4 key points are positively correlated with each other. That means they are mutual beneficial elements of Olympic marketing and support each other in making an excellent basis for effective Olympic marketing.

Our thorough investigation of the data revealed that the influence among these 4 key elements does have interesting differences. For example, higher awareness has a strong influence on increasing purchase intent than the other two elements. We also found that if a brand does well in promotional recall, it will have better scores in its Olympic value recall.

Actually, different brands emphasize different elements in their Olympic marketing. While the top 10 brands all do well on these 4 key points, they differ in their marketing tactics, some focus to a large degree on Olympic sponsorship awareness, other focus on communicating with the consumers through Olympic Values messages. As such these brands feature different developmental trends in their Olympic marketing. Coke do well in all of these aspects, and as a result its effectiveness trend has risen to the highest level in the shortest amount of time. Yili does well in sponsorship awareness driving an upward trend for them overall as well but its upward movement while strong is more gradual than Coca-Cola’s and more reliant of sponsorship awareness to drive its movement. Johnson & Johnson focus on communicating the association between their brand and Olympic values. As a result its upward trends shows a very stable trend, not nearly as sharp as Coca-Cola and Yili but very consistent in moving upward.

Our trend model is based on the data collected the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2008. With the arrival of the Olympic Games we have seen more and more methods in play for protecting the benefits of Olympic Sponsors. In Beijing in particular we see more sponsor exposure in outdoor media, significant brand experience activities with brands working hard to get closer to the consumers through a wide variety of engaging activities. This work will help to strengthen the 4 key criteria we are measuring and we continue to monitor performance on all of them. We have designed two waves as a pre-post test to check changes from before to after the Olympic period and our final wave of research will run from October to November 2008, to follow up on what the long-term influence of Olympic marketing is and in the process modify our OP trend findings.

Olympic marketing trends key characteristics;

1、Olympic sponsorship awareness is the critical point in driving increases in OP index scores
2、Promotional recalls is the second most important influence on increasing OP index increases
3、Olympic marketing for different brands have very different focal points.

In summary, each brand should work hard to find the most important element in its Olympic marketing, and pay attention to it’s development phase by phase. Each brand has a unique trend when it comes to Olympic marketing activities and all are strongly cemented in performance based on these 4 key elements.

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