Visa Case Questions

...

5) Discuss Visa's involvement with Rugby and the Premiere League and why those sponsorships did not work out?

Visa partnered with the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and planned to use its partnership to to deliver benefits to Visa cardholders (such as providing up to 10,000 tickets to Visa card users). Visa also planned to continue its partnership with Australia in 2000 to help them promote the Rugby World Cup. Visa also saw the Rugby world cup as a cheaper alternative to the FIFA World Cup. Unfortunately, when Visa sponsored the New Zealand All Blacks team, they found they couldn’t get necessary access to the players. The team also was not proactive in terms of protecting ambush marketing and did not value what Visa brought to the brand.

In 1998, Visa partnered with the British Premier League to get rights to use the Premier league logo, to get exclusive rights to the league (not the team) and a certain number of tickets. Unfortunately, the partnership did not work out as the Premier League did not assist Visa with promotions run outside the UK (they failed to provide tickets for Asia ticket winners to Visa). Visa also had problems creating team-related benefits with their league style sponsorship (as every team was able to partner with whomever they wanted) and so Visa decided not to continue the relationship.

6) Explain how Visa measures the success and effectiveness of its sponsorships?

Visa wanted to know how to quantify the value of their sponsorships and began using a few techniques. They first tried tracking television logo time, but they realized that this was not very effective in terms of marketing. Visa then used external consultants who found that Visa cards grew from 137M in 1986 to over 1B in 2003. Visa’s market share had risen from 33% to 53% since they started sponsoring the Olympics and they had seen their brad preference go up to 50%. Visa also saw that individuals believed Olympic sponsors deserved their business. Visa saw its compounded annual growth from the Olympics as being 16% and they measured their increase in consumer awareness as being 72% in the Sydney Olympics. Visa also checked the effectiveness of individual promotions and saw that individual ads could raise usage by up to 17% in the Olympics (compared to just 3% otherwise).

7) Comment on Visa's NFL sponsorship, in your opinion is it a good campaign, what do you like or dislike about it? (Note that you'll need to do some quick outside research as outside scope of what is discussed in the case)

In 2015 Visa renewed its sponsorship with the NFL for a 5 year deal. Visa believes that NFL games give them an opportunity that can be found nowhere else because the environment of NFL games is an "incomparable opportunity with a phenomenal platform." Visa’s deal is more of a partnership than a sponsorship and allowed opportunities for valuable exposure. For example, Visa has a deal with Levi Stadium for the 2016 Super Bowl where Visa will include every payment system it has to fans at the stadium. Visa’s slogan is “everywhere you want to be” and this allows them to do that. Visa wants you to use them whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer. Visa will remain the exclusive payment service for the league. I think this is a great deal because the NFL is the most watched sport in the US. When you combine that with the fact that NFL views actually go up during tough economic times it means Visa is using this sponsorship as a hedge for recessions. It allows Visa usage to increase when total usage decreases and allows Visa to continue to be “everywhere you want to be.”