How Leicester’s Cinderella Story Translates to Marketing

I’m a huge football fan. I’m also a huge football fan (In this case, since I’m a “Yank,” I have to call it soccer). I’ve been following the English Premier League closely since the 2010–2011 season, and in that time, the tale has been pretty typical. Your top 4 heavy spenders (Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea) are ALWAYS at the top. And I really do mean “always.” The last time there was a league champion other than those four was back in 1994–1995 when Blackburn Rovers took home the title. I’ll add that I’m a huge Tottenham Hotspur supporter, and we’re notorious for finishing just outside of that top 4, looking in.

So this year, a team just promoted a year ago, barely avoiding relegation back to the Championship league, Leicester City started out hot and immediately rose to the top of the table. Threads on Reddit, comments on Facebook, tweets all mocked the Foxes for their cute attempt at making a title run. More and more weeks passed, they kept winning. Their lead in the table grew. They fended off the massive top 4, they fended off Tottenham and West Ham. At 5000 to 1 odds at the beginning of the season, Leicester City not only held on, but dominated the league with only 3 losses on their way to the club’s first Premier League title. The football… err, soccer… community all came together for probably the first time in history to see, and cheer for this historic feat.

So, the stage is set; let’s get back to my blog title. What does all of this have to do with marketing? For one, you’ve got to envy the Leicester City social media and web team. As millennials in marketing, many of us have been tasked with running the social media presence for our respective companies, and for the most part, it’s a grind. Top management in traditional sales organizations often overlooks the amount of time, energy and resources it takes to build out a sound social media strategy, generate the content necessary to keep the conversation active to keep audience members engaged. Barring any massive changes to the company, our social media growth largely depends on the quality of the message coming out of it. In Leicester’s case, their product (the team) was who largely helped to generate that growth. A relative unknown to title winners in a 9 month span, the volume of new traffic to their website and social media presence was more immense than they could have imagined. But credit where credit is due. Leicester’s social team was up to the task, embraced the challenge of pleasing a massive new audience, and adapted to their new reality. Seriously, go check out their Twitter account; it’s got consistent branding, graphics, video, they’re doing it all right.

Let’s get to the customer side of things. Of course Leicester has their lifelong fans that reside in the small English city about an hour outside of Birmingham with a population of only about 300,000. But the Leicester product won over an entire community of new fans across the world. How do you get your business to at least appear as visible and as dominant as Leicester did to their audience? For starters, branding is a massive influence on this. Leicester became a brand this year. For the next 12 months, that brand is now associated as a champion. I work in the tech space and there’s no easier job as marketers than when I can say that my product is the best in the industry, and we’ve got the statistics to prove it. You want an effective server firewall? Here, ours outperforms competitors 99.7% of the time, and here’s a whitepaper, infographic, video and timeline that shows it, depending on how you prefer to consume it.

I’ll leave with this thought. Not all companies are going to have a captive audience as fans of the Premier League. and those fans watching may not even realize that they’re consumers. They may say “I’ve never purchased tickets, I don’t own a jersey, I’m not a stakeholder in their company.” What they don’t realize is that their mind share is currency. When you have a message that is as captive as Leicester’s Cinderella story, your audience doesn’t need to be a traditional purchaser. The power of awareness and investment means more eyeballs on your content and more people talking with their peers about your product, and that means you’ve got to give them a reason to invest their dollars and cents (or pounds and pence). A company that does this to perfection is HubSpot. HubSpot has a massive gallery of free content available for your use and is updated daily. But what’s behind that paid version of HubSpot? Their content is good enough for you to want to find out.

I’m gutted Tottenham couldn’t find a way to win our first title in 60 years this year, but couldn’t be happier for Leicester and the story that has unfolded for them. Look at your business from their perspective — find that drive to toss excuses aside and maximize the use of your talents.