The Official Beer Of Soccer

If you’ve been here for more than 5 minutes, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of nicking great ideas from other businesses, for a couple of reasons

The first is that most people copy other people in the fitness industry.

Copying an industry which has the creativity of a house brick - generally doesn’t facilitate unique and novel solutions to problems, or interesting ways of doing things in general

But the more positive reason? Is that these businesses are huge.

They have big budgets for testing ideas, big budgets for marketing campaigns

Big budgets for hiring the best minds in the areas of marketing, R&D, product and customer experience.

So stealing their stuff is the cheapest way to spend millions of pounds testing ideas for what could work in your business.

Anyway, one cool story came from a podcast I listened to on Heineken.

Heineken weren’t an official sponsor of the World Cup just gone - sponsorship of events like this, the Olympics etc is craaaaazy money.

I don’t know whether it was the price that meant they didn’t do it, or whether they didn’t want to, or there was another brand chosen instead.

But generally, what you might think of as a ‘missed opportunity’ in this sense - is an unbelievably helpful constraint for creative thinking.

For Heineken? It made them think about how they could use the World Cup as an opportunity for them, even without the official association.

What they did?

They decided they’d like to be ‘The Official Beer of Soccer’

So they said they were - in fact, they trademarked it years before, and used it everywhere.

They sponsored the Champions League, which certainly helped.

But using this helped them out-earn the actual sponsors of the World Cup - by being cleverer, not richer or more official.

If we think about coaches - there are the coaches who will use simple ideas like this

And they’ll do incredibly well from it.

Then there’ll be the coaches who hate people doing this.

You don’t need certifications, or a huge audience or ‘official’ status to own a conversation

You need people to associate you with that thing.

If you can be loudest and clearest on a thing - that will beat buying the right to claim it through doing a course etc.

You have to be clever with this - you see people self-proclaim themselves ‘World Leading Coach’

Which has the subtlety of someone performing keyhole surgery with a chainsaw.

But if you get this right, it can be incredibly powerful for your business.

Other people might not love it - but then you have to ask ‘Am I building my business for me, to help people - or to appease my peers’.