Background
As the world’s most valuable sports brand, Manchester United constantly strive for creative ways to engage with their many fans worldwide. It’s essential that the club retain an emotional bond with its fans – making them feel part of the team in everything it does – in or out of season.
In addition to maintaining a relationship with their existing fan base, they also need to acquire new fans for the club and new advocates for the brand. Effective emotional engagement and detailed data capture are the lifeblood of this process. Given the size and complexity of the United fan base, this is no easy task. After all, the chances of every follower from around the globe having the opportunity to visit the Theatre of Dreams are slim.
After ten years, the turf at Old Trafford was being replaced in its entirety. We were tasked with finding a way to turn this occasion into an engagement campaign that would not only make the brand inclusive to their vast fan base but also provide a platform to gather data from the countries and regions.
Strategy
Our core insight was that this was not merely turf, it was the site of compelling stories – legend-making, epoch-defining stories. Our strategy was to take sections of the turf and turn them into must-have collector’s pieces for any real fan from around the world.
The focal point of this would be a competition with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for those who register to win the very turf where iconic moments have occurred in the clubs' history. If you couldn’t visit the turf, here was an opportunity for the turf to visit you.
Campaign
We named the campaign ‘This is Your Turf’, creating an immediate sense of inclusion and engagement with fans. This was then woven into a multichannel campaign with digital at its heart. We promoted the campaign with the hashtag #thisisyourturf to increase peer-to-peer distribution on social media. In addition, we improved the virality of our campaign by offering increased numbers of entries for increased number of shares online.
Results
Internal reaction has been universally positive and early responses indicate this could well be another hugely successful engagement campaign.