I just shared the presentation below to the Marketing Accountability Standards Board Summer Summit at Rutgers Business School, as part of my CEO address. It stimulated some great discussion and ideas. Here they are:
1. Experiential marketing can accelerate brand building and grow sales, profits and business value.
- The example of the 2026 World Cup demonstrates this
- It works whether a brand is an official sponsor, like Adidas and Nike or an unofficial one, such as Levi’s, Gilette and Heinz, ambushing the event without paying a dime.
2. To work, experiential marketing must fit with the brand.
- The last Mastercard CMO, Raja Rajamannar, was highly innovative in his reinvention of the Mastercard brand and go-to-market strategy.
- Some of his initiatives clearly did fit with the brand and do work. The brand had reached the iconic status needed to make killing the wordmark and just using the symbol possible. Creating a sonic brand signal to sound on credit card readers whenever a transaction goes through also clearly fits with the brand
- Others don’t fit with the brand and don’t work. One example –Mastercard perfumes, a gimmick which fell flat.
3. An event may destroy value for its owner’s brand
- The World Cup built value for other brands. But what about FIFA? FIFA’s behavior generated highly negative publicity. Ticket price gouging. Open corruption and knuckling under to the US. Not to mention the subsequent attempt to privatize FIFA. We don’t have the data right now, but a good bet is that the World Cup destroyed more brand value for FIFA than commercialization and high prices generated for the organization and its leaders.
4. A major event may impact a country’s brand value
- Our analysis shows that Brand America has been on a downward trajectory and losing value globally. We haven’t quantified the World Cup’s impact on Brand America’s value yet. But the hypothesis we want to explore is that the explosion of camaraderie inspired by the World Cup had a positive impact. Fans from other countries came to the US and were surprised and delighted by welcome they got and went back home with positive memories .Standout examples of this were the experience of the Scottish beer-drinking fans, who drank Boston dry and the surge in sales of ranch dressing, which overseas fans bought in bucket-loads to take home.
5. A team doesn’t have to win to build brand value
- Does winning help a team’s brand? Yes. But a team can build value (in this case for its country) by having an outstanding player or players. Cabo Verde is a good example. The 2026 World Cup has probably done more for Cabo Verde’s international brand awareness than any conventional tourism campaign could have achieved. A country of only about 500,000 people qualified for the first time and reached the knockout stage, drawing with Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia before losing 3-2 to Argentina in extra time. It has given it a powerful brand story- an emotional proposition that is much bigger than “beautiful islands.” It has mobilized the diaspora, the many Cabo Verdeans around the world.
6. Responding to negatives builds brand, doing nothing may destroy value
- The brands that reacted to having their logos covered up by publicizing and celebrating it built value – gaining a huge amount of positive buzz on social media and in the press.
- Levi’s started it by wrapping its Instagram and TikTok profile pictures in mock-ups of the covered logo, captioned “Welcoming the world to the beautiful [redacted] stadium!” over the viral “Nobody’s Gonna Know” audio. It extended the joke to its own storefronts in Paris, London and Hong Kong, draping them in the same white sheet treatment as the stadium.
- Gillette stadium was forced to rename itself Boston stadium. Gillette retaliated by burying its logo in shaving foam, instead of a tarpaulin.
- FIFA required stadium concession Heinz bottles to be covered with black tape, because they are not an official sponsor. Heinz embraced the restriction instead of hiding from it and actively posted images of their iconic bottles wrapped in black tape on social media. Building on the buzz of the blacked-out bottles, Heinz introduced a limited edition “Unofficial Stadium Ketchup.”
- What happened to the value of the other brands that meekly caved in to the coverups hoping no-one would notice?
- Among them were Ford, American Airlines, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and MetLife
- They looked spineless and silly, eroding perceptions and negatively impacting brand value.
But the major learning for us all is: don’t just talk to your customers (traditional advertising); involve them in your brand (through experiences.)
