Top 5 World Cup brands

The figures, from Experian Hitwise, indicats that UK Internet searches for Budweiser increased by 25% between the week ending June 12th and the week ending June 19th and its Experian Hitwise World Cup Brands Index* score increased from 145 to 182 based upon the volume of searches for the brand.

The top five performing brands in the Experian Hitwise World Cup Brands Index last week (w/e June 19th) were as follows.

Brand Index Week 2 – top five performers

Budweiser was the only brand featured in last week’s Index to retain its position in the top five. The remaining top four positions in the table were this week filled by sponsors from a variety of categories, with car manufacturer Kia in second place and significantly outperforming its larger automotive rivals.

Kia (Slovakian team sponsor and FIFA partner) saw UK Internet searches increase by 13.2% and its Brand Index improve from 91 to 103.

Fiat was the next best performing automotive brand with an 8.2% increase in searches.

Australian shopping centre giant, Westfield, completed the top five along with Vodafone and Adidas.

Meanwhile, the Technology and Telecoms category was the best overall performer in the brand index with searches up 5.2%, well ahead of its nearest rival, Automotive (1.6%).

“The brands that performed well in the Experian Hitwise World Cup Brands Index this week were those sponsoring the ‘underdog’ teams: Kia (Slovakia), Westfield (Australia), Vodafone (Greece) and Budweiser (USA). Given the poor performances of some of the favourites in the opening games, this isn’t perhaps so surprising,” commented Robin Goad, Research Director for Experian Hitwise.

“Our analysis highlights that it’s as much about how a brand runs its sponsorship package as it is about who they are sponsoring. Simply aligning with a hopefully successful team isn’t enough.

“Budweiser has an integrated marketing campaign that links outdoor media, TV and press advertising with in-store on pack promotions, trade promotions and an online presence that includes a ‘predict the winners’ game. Kia is also pushing its sponsorship through dealerships, a special World Cup edition car and by creating a World Cup fans’ site in conjunction with four newspapers and broadcasters.”

Robin Goad adds: “It is also interesting to see that the Technology and Telecoms brands performed best overall, as this hasn’t yet had a big impact on searches for many of their products. Sales of televisions were expected to surge on the back of the World Cup, but last week searches of television were down 14% compared to last year. It would seem to be the mobile phone brands Vodafone and T-Mobile that are boosting the performance of this category.”

Other ways in which the World Cup has influenced UK online behaviour over the last week include:

Following the 20-fold increase in searches for vuvuzelas between the weeks ending June 5th and June 12th, there was a further 4-fold increase in searches last week. During the week ending June19th there were five times as many searches for ‘vuvuzela’ than for ‘Wayne Rooney’, the England team’s most searched for player.

Bavaria, the Dutch larger, was the fifth most visited beer website in the UK on the 15th June following the beer brand’s marketing ambush stunt during the Holland versus Denmark game, which saw the arrest of two Dutch women.

1 in every 88 Internet searches in the UK was World cup related last week. The FIFA homepage (www.fifa.com) is the biggest recipient of World Cup search traffic, and last week was the 71h most visited website in the UK, and the fourth most popular Sports website.

UK Internet searches relating to the French football team increased by 150% last week as the team experienced problems with player revolt following the sending home of Nicolas Anelka.

Overall Brand Index Week 2

The next Experian Hitwise Brand Index will be available on 29 June 2010.

Source: www.hitwise.com/datacentre

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