Advertising and Marketing

Many football clubs do not like describing themselves as a business. But Manchester United was one of the first clubs to redefine itself as a business. Its annual turnover is estimated to be $368 million. It was also the first football club to become a public listed company. During the 1990s, its stock market value peaked at US $1 billion. The club employs over 500 full-time staff[1] It also encompasses a diverse range of business activities, including financial services, merchandising and licensing, catering and conference facilities, events and media management, a radio station, a publications business and its own digital TV channel. Attempts to send MUFC across the world also include a vast amount of advertising. From advertising can be said that its main aim is to sell. In Power Play, Boyle and Haynes describe the advertising rhetoric behind sport clubs as being clear that the company is seeking to transform the one-to-many communication of televised sport and that the process of ‘immersion’ is illustrated by a club’s website[2] The product that must be sold can be either something tangible as a football kit or a ‘sense of belonging’ Of course the second ‘commodity’ is not tangible as shirts, footballs, mobile phones etc. but is just as important, maybe even more important for the eventual total income of a company. With the internet being a major part of social life, even the abstract goods should be seen as commodities just as much as the goods sold in stores. Besides winning the support of the fans (which is priceless), there is more of the abstract to win over. Manchester United Football Club is therefore just as big a company as one from any other branches, trying to sell their goods. Millions are spend to become the best, the most popular and the richest club of the world. Through advertising this can be retraced to several striking examples. With every example, some additional information provides the necessary knowledge to understand why I’ve chosen for these examples. The first example is the annual reference to the USA Summer Tour. MUFC travels to the U.S. every year to play some friendly matches. However, these matches prove to be much more than they seem. Some months beforehand, manutd.com changes their welcoming page in a ‘MU goes USA’ page. When you go to www.manutd.com  you will first of all land on their welcome page. This page changes almost every couple of days or sometimes weeks, usually referring to an actual event. With the USA Summer Tour they offer special trips to the US for their fans. Also, it is a perfect way to tickle the Americans and remind them of the attractiveness of football. The USA not being a football mad country like England has developed massively on that part. Especially the US women’s football team has lifted the popularity of the game. With their worldwide successes (Olympic Gold and two World Cup titles, with the 1999 WC title in their home country as major marketing and media event as culminating point) the US women also paved the way for European clubs to come to the USA. With their advertisements, MUFC, addresses a varied audience from football fanatics to the yet-to-be-fully-persuaded Americans. The actual website then has both banners and a separate USA section. Throughout the website the USA Summer Tour comes forward as being the summer priority.                        

The next example concerns mobile phones, loans and credit cards. I will put these different aspects together for I believe that they all represent the same underlying idea/reason. Today, people can get mobile phones, ring tones, logos and so on from almost everything they want. Popular television series (i.e Buffy, Friends), singers (Britney Spears, Robbie Williams) and Hollywood personalities; they can all be ‘ordered’ worldwide via ring tones, voicemail messages etc. It is all about identity and the need for people to distinguish themselves from others by showing what they chose to represent them (I will come back to this in a minute) It is no different with Manchester United. Several advertisements on the site refer to the MU mobile phones on which you will receive text messages with scores, news and so on. Together with this are the more financial related advertisements like the MU loans and credit cards. What is so important with this example is that when it comes to finance, people want trustworthy companies or banks to take care of their money. The fact that MUFC offers their fans the same products and services as any other real bank or insurance company offers us a clear view in the deep trust the fans have in their club. Here it is not the football club that has to play every weekend that they trust their money with, it is the brand Manchester United that deserves their trust. Comparing to Holland we see the same with for instance Ajax Amsterdam. ABN Amro is one of the club’s major sponsors and the bank offers fans special Ajax accounts, Ajax credit cards, special children’s’ offers and more. The bank is associated with the club and vice versa. Back to United it shows that the same goes with the products and services they offer. Besides the advertisements to expand their so-called territory, like in the USA Summer Tour, a priority seems to offer security to the fans.

Interesting fact: Manchester United is now planning a Chinese Summer Tour for the season 2005-2006. It should be noted that Manchester already has 10 United shops in China alone, United ‘flavored’ restaurants and United football schools (besides the millions of fans over there) United are taking matters into their own hands and it can be looked upon as one of the better business plans.

            The last example is the more commercial and wide ranged MU Store which you can visit not only online but which has an actual store in the city of Manchester (with a huge amount of square metres which makes you look at the Ajax fan shop in their Stadium with some pity)  “Visit our MU Shop!” several banners portray. Whenever MU will play in different shirts as is the case at the beginning of every new season, advertisements are to be found in all the different sections of the site. Fans and members can be the first to purchase these exclusive shirts, even before they hit the stores. Again, the special position the Man U fans have acclaimed is being put forward through advertising. Everything you can think of (provided with an MUFC crest) can be bought or ordered in the shop, again providing tools to either build or strengthen your identity whether you are young old, living in England or abroad. Following the hometown example, the company also opened a Man Utd store in Asia. To give an example of the overlapping sections of this football club: Just after Man Utd opened their Asian shop, they signed a never-heard-of young Chinese striker and (online) sales increased with more than 100%. It is all part of the deal and advertising helps gaining more and more profit for the companies (I’ll come back to this in a later section)

            An additional note goes out to the Unicef banners that are spread over the website. From somewhere in the mid-nineties Man Utd has been on several Africa trips which differ immensely from the USA Tours. Where the latter is drenched in commercial motives, the Africa trips were always to gain more and more attention to the lack of social services and hygiene and the ongoing extreme poverty. Unicef’s Chairman of Unicef UK explains the co-operation on the site: “The global respect and adoration in which Manchester United is held will continue to help UNICEF with its work on behalf of children around the world. Manchester United's global reach and appeal will continue to go a long way to benefit disadvantaged children throughout the world and make a real difference to their lives” [3]

  The social awareness these days has, with thanks to the accessibility and power to spread news in a clink, become a must-take hurdle for any kind of major company. Show people you care and your fans and consumers will see it too.

Finally, in addition to both the intermediality and advertising I would firstly like to address Harries’ statement on defining the new dimensions of intertextuality[4] in which he takes the music business as an example of the interrelationship of cultural forms. Harries explains how the music business has developed from a disks and tapes world to a  soundtrack, t-shirts, cards and so on multi-merchandising branch. This example has the perfect outline for the football world as we now it today. Ajax has its own kiddie accounts, Manchester United offers loans, mobile phones and trips abroad and David Beckham advertises all his commercial deals[5] The list can go on and on. Bottom line: football has become a big marketing and commercial world in which advertising sells the products and the values a club (or player) wants to spread.

            One may ask to what extend Manchester United fits the description of a brand. The examples of the financial products and services already provide a part of the answer. The name Manchester United has more than one association. Fans add value to the name. It represents (for them) the best football team in the world, with top-class players (with its own youth players as an important asset), a stadium (Old Trafford) that breathes tradition and ambition. Manchester United is therefore a symbol for all the above, and the fans (plus consumers!) attach psychological meaning to the name. Tybout and Carpenter wrote an explanatory article on creating and managing brands in which they dissect the word ‘brand’[6] Different types according to them are functional brands, image brands and experiential brands. Applicable on Man Utd are both the functional and image brand. Because of the wide range of marketing areas as I explained before, Man Utd proves to be both.  Functional brands (according to Tybout and Carpenter) are bought by customers to satisfy functional needs[7] (as with the credit cards, loans, insurances). Image brands focus on the consumer that uses the brand. Characteristics of the users represent the value of the brand in the minds of the buyers[8] Like Nike or Reebok is an image brand, so is MU. Their shield (as logo) is to be found on every product. People buy t-shirts of Man Utd with the names of players like Giggs, Van Nistelrooy, Christiano Ronaldo or Keane on their backs because of the name and the shirt. Like Nike sneakers used to be cool to wear in the 90’s, so can it be cool to wear a

Van Nistelrooy shirt because of his achievements at one the most popular clubs. With the blurring of the branding boundaries and the type of company, Manchester United becomes some kind of experience. The internet, advertising, marketing, products all add up to the picture a fan has in his head.           

            A clear example of how Manchester United is related to several brands itself was the switch of shirt sponsors in the beginning of 2002. Sharp and Umbro had been shirt sponsors for more than 30 years, fans did not know better than Sharp and Umbro BEING Manchester United. When in 2002, United decided not to prolong their contract with them, but instead went along with Nike and Vodafone, many fans were upset. Some considered this switch to be ‘too popular’ and therefore handing in exactly some of what is one of United’s strong points: tradition. However, with Nike and Vodafone new worlds opened up and through the advertising (Vodafone being the mobile phone provider, with banners and advertisements all over the website[9]) fans started to benefit from these brands. Manchester United as the brand it is now had two more brands that carried their own symbols and psychological meanings with them. MU once more extended their empire. The deal with Nike alone is worth over

500 million US dollars over 13 years according to Forbes and the Vodafone deal 50 million US dollars for 4 years.[10] Forbes also claims that for these mega companies United is not a football club but a global sports franchise. Interesting is that, also concerning the already mentioned USA Tour, Manchester United decided to stop their contract with Carlsberg as being the club’s beer and instead choosing Budweiser, a brand which is popular in the States (PepsiCo was being used in their Asian campaigns) Forbes ends with an all-saying statement:

“The club has a playing side with revenue from ticket sales, a media side to manage broadcasting and Internet rights to its matches and stars, and a merchandising and commercial side, which collectively aim to turn fans of the first into customers of the second two”

With the coming of the multimillion sponsor deals and the accessibility of the internet, meaning a worldwide audience, ‘Manchester United The Company’ keeps growing, like a tree gaining more and more ramifications.