What does Scottish Football mean to you?  Is it the reason you buy the papers every day?  Is it the reason you don’t buy the papers every day? Did you watch the Italy match?  Did you watch the Georgia match?  Who hasn’t heard of Ally McCoist, Denis Law or Kenny Dalglish?

Scottish football has, to a greater or lesser extent, an impact on the lives of just about everyone in the country.  It’s true.  Whether it’s getting stuck in the Glasgow traffic on a big-day at Hampden, switching on the TV to see how the lads are getting on, or donning your navy shirt and kilt at every opportunity to join the ‘Tartan Army’, Brand Scotland is big business.  All five million of us, at some point, have been impacted by the Scotland football team, though we certainly tend to ‘sing’ more when we’re winning.  Just ask Colin Banks, Marketing Manager for Scottish Football.

“Success of the international team is vital, because it raises the nation’s hopes.  When it all boils down to it I’ve got five million customers on a good day, but on a bad day I’ve maybe only got one,” explains Banks, speaking to In The Winning Zone from his office at Hampden Park.
 
The national team isn’t the be all and end all for Scottish football.  But it is certainly the most high profile.  When Colin first came to the Association six years ago, he directed a wide-ranging market research campaign to discover what the SFA ‘brand’ actually was.  The results produced by this research revealed that the SFA itself wasn’t a brand so much as it was a ‘brand owner’, as Colin explains.

“We worked with focus groups but backed it up with quantitative research as well. The idea really was to identify how people saw us as an organisation. We went out to other areas of football and actually asked, ‘how do you see us, and what do you see our role as being, why are we here?’

Three individual brands emerged as the prominent prongs supporting the SFA umbrella.
 
“Our strongest and closest brand was the national team, and that was right across the board, so effectively anything to do with a navy blue jersey was our strongest brand.  The second one was the Scottish Cup because obviously that was an event that was run by us, but it gave us a powerful tool to communicate more on a club format.

“Then the third one was youth football.  Everybody saw part of our role as the guardians of the game and within that responsible for the promotion of youth football.  There’s an awful lot of people get involved in it, from volunteers, right through to the government, but we are seen as the centre, we should be talking to all these people to make sure it happens.”

The structure of the Scottish FA therefore ensures that the revenue generated in tier 1 – the national side and its associated income – is reinvested into tiers 2 and 3 – the clubs and the youth game.  Tier 2 – the clubs – in turn also plays its part in contributing to youth development by providing further stepping stones for young players to progress.

“You almost have two sides to it,” says Banks.  “There’s the development element and the commercial element. Where we’re slightly different from most organisations is that we effectively raise money on one side in order that we can fund the game on the other, which is different to how clubs would operate.”

“Effectively our shareholders are our member clubs.  So if you look at it from that point of view, there’s a responsibility for us to generate money so that it can be effectively reinvested in the grassroots of the game.  The revenue is regenerated into coaching courses, youth programs or whatever else is required.”

And youth football, indeed youth sport in general, is where it really matters.  This is where the Scotland XI of the future will come from; where our fans, referees, coaches and even crowd stewards come from.  But Banks sees the influence of the Scottish FA as wider ranging than that.  He sees the power of football as a vehicle for all kinds of sporting benefits, from our swimming instructors right through to Glasgow 2014 medallists.  In Scotland, the chances are, all will have come across football at some point in their childhood.

“Yes, and there are so many areas where young people can move in to, not just from the point of view of sport.  So many people now are looking at the benefits that can be gained from football.  For example, there’s the health advantages, and of course the benefits from an inclusion perspective, so there’s a lot of ways sport in general can help develop young people, and in particular football, because it’s the most powerful.  If we’re going to develop sport overall then, yes, football has a significant role to play in that, as it probably has the most powerful voice out of all sports.”

And, contrary to popular opinion, football is not averse to teaming up with other sports in a bid to promote and assist Scottish sport as a whole. 

“If the national team in rugby suddenly wins a grand slam or is performing well, other sports enjoy the good feeling element in the country. And you tend to find you get a knock on effect, from one sport towards another in terms of people feeling good about Scottish sports. As much as football is the dominant one we’re still inclusive within that, we can still get a benefit from someone else doing well, because it comes back to Scottish sports men and women performing well.”

And Scotland performing well, says Colin, is the key to the whole business of international football. 

“At the end of the day, we are very fortunate with Scotland, we’ve got a situation where we have a great fan base, and obviously it becomes a lot bigger when you’re doing well on the pitch, but we still fight our corner when we’re not necessarily doing that well, because of the loyalty of the fans we have. There’s still the Scotland factor, it’s the same as what I would call your core supporters at any club. Through thick and thin they’ll always be there. What you tend to find is you have the added bonus when suddenly we start performing well.”

The Scotland factor is what Colin likes to call ‘the emotional attachment,’ which gives involvement with a brand like the Scotland football team an added dimension for potential sponsors.

“Companies are always looking for more of a return in investment. Whereas before there was an element of measuring sponsorship to a point, it’s becoming far more complicated now because companies are looking at every pound they spend and saying, ‘well would I be better spending that on advertising, would I be better spending that on new media, would I be better spending that directly with my customers?

“So that pound of marketing spend became far more scrutinised and we had to become cleverer, and also have a focus on not just looking at what we had from a sponsorship point of view, but actually looking at how we take our brands and make them more powerful, which then makes them more attractive to people.  The great thing about sponsorship, especially with football, is we can offer the one thing that two dimensional campaigns can’t, which is the emotional attachment.  The emotional attachment to football is the one that’s highly attractive to an awful lot of companies.”

That emotional attachment, at its peak, is one of the most powerful marketing tools that any organisation could wish to own.  And it is something that most major businesses can’t acquire, because an individual can’t be ‘sold’ that affection. 

“It’s a great brand to work with, and it’s also quite interesting as people feel they own it. For example, there are huge strong brands in the world like Coca Cola.  However people don’t feel they own Coke, but they feel they own the Scotland National team. It’s quite a different challenge in terms of  how you work with your customers.  Because it’s your country as well, there’s that nationalistic pride element, and it does unite people and it does bring people together.

“It’s good because it gives us that fantastic base. As any marketer will tell you, you need that, companies would die to have the emotional attachment we have to our international teams, but the other element that comes is people feel it’s theirs and want more of an input into what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, so it does bring its challenges as well.”

For the meantime, however, brand Scotland is pretty safe.  The Scotland v Italy match in November was, as far as Colin could measure, the single biggest event for Scottish football since they squared off against Brazil in the opening game of the 1998 World Cup.  And that was a very special day indeed.

“We had a five million audience in Scotland that day, because every single person that was living in Scotland, was Scottish at that moment in time, was watching that game, listening to it, or talking about it.  It’s the only time I’ve ever seen the full power of the brand. The streets were empty,  it was ghost town stuff because even if you weren’t interested in football, it captured people. It’s great because at the heart of the brand it’s got that moment in time which just captures everybody.

“My mum doesn’t really know about football, but that day she watched the game, because it’s ‘us’ in this big showcase. So when you’re going through all the hard times, there’s still that little bit in the middle that burns away.  What you’ve got to do is light it now and again, and tell people ‘this is what we can be!’”

RO
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