The Hindu Business Line : Business with football

If you are willing to take your mind off depressing cricket, here is some serious football from Stockport County Football Club. Formed in 1883 as Heaton Norris Rovers by members of the Wycliffe Congressional Church, the English club played its first recorded game in October 1884, informs Wikipedia.

The club holds the record for the most consecutive wins without conceding, says Eytan Halon in a story dated March 5, on www.scotland-mad.co.uk.

Interestingly, the soccer club plays a novel role too: that of facilitating international business development, between the UK and China. This is how: A business team from the UK accompanies the players when they tour China.

"The delegation is greeted by top government officials and treated like VIPs ... At the matches, there is a VIP section in the spectator stand for government officials, Communist Party members and the Stockport delegation." Thus notes a case study in Business-to-Business Marketing, by Ross Brennan, Louise Canning and Raymond McDowell, from Sage (www.sagepublications.com) .

There is more of business-with-fun after the game when, over a banquet, the delegation members make contacts. What happens thereafter?

Read this example from the book: "The textile table (at the banquet) included a British company that was hoping to strike a deal to promote a sportswear brand. The region that hosted the banquet had over 3,000 textile factories and was famous for clothing and football.

Less than 24 hours after leaving the UK, the British manager had met government people and representatives from other provinces."

Another example is about how a consortium could leapfrog bureaucracy and get an okay within two days for "a $300-million project to set up a high-tech centre of excellence for automotive engineering," thus: "The consortium met with the town's deputy mayor on the afternoon of the football match. During the banquet four representatives from the mayor's office asked further questions and the following day a meeting was set up with the mayor himself.

At this meeting, the mayor identified the official in the town planning department responsible for allocating land for business development opportunities, contacted the official on behalf of the consortium and personally endorsed the consortium's project."

The British government's trade and export arm UKTI recognises the power of soccer as a hook for business, and supports the commercial innovation that Stockport FC could achieve. So much so, the UKTI now helps sponsor the tour.

"Business-to-business marketing is not something that is done by marketers to passive organisational buyers," say the authors. It is more about a network of relationships, they emphasise.

And the book is about "the network of business-to-business transactions, largely invisible to the final consumer."

Compelling read.

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali