Pernod aims to get lift from football fever

The company is allocating up to Bt350 million as a marketing budget for its 2008 fiscal year (July 2008-June 2009) while last year it spent almost nothing, senior marketing manager Krisda Kamolvarinthip said yesterday.

This year, Pernod is adding a new marketing strategy of a sport game to its current strategy featuring rock music.

The company has been using rock music as a marketing activity for the last three years. It believes that now is the right time to use sport as well.

Under its sport strategy, the company has set up a "100 Fantasy Football Game" campaign. To implement the campaign, Pernod bought a licence for the world-famous football online game "Fantasy Game" from the UK. It has translated the game into Thai for people here to play.

The campaign requires an investment of Bt20 million out of Pernod's overall marketing budget.

The game will be played during the 2008-2009 English Premier League season, which starts on Saturday and runs for nine months.

Players, who must be aged at least 20, have to register at Pernod's website to become the manager of a Premier League team. They then select 11 famous footballers who actually play in the league and manage the team under a £115-million (Bt7.3 billion) budget, as well as plan playing strategy.

Players have to watch the real Premier League as the result of each game will be converted into points in their teams. Winners of the games will be awarded various prizes.

Krisda said Pernod did not expect the campaign to help it generate high sales but its priority was creating a community among the players, who could be its long-term customers. The strategy will also allow it to collect a customer database.

Customers can decide whether they want to get further information related to Pernod's customer relationship management programme and join any activities.

So far, 40,000 people have already registered at Pernod's website to create their own football teams.

With the marketing efforts, Pernod expects sales of 100 Pipers to achieve a better performance by the end of its current fiscal year after experiencing a sales drop of 3 per cent in the 2007 fiscal year.

However, the company expects its sales this year to remain the same as last year, which means flat growth, said Krisda.

Nevertheless, 100 Pipers will still be able to maintain its 80-per-cent market share in a segment worth 2.1 million cases of whisky, he said.

Krisda added that the whole alcoholic-beverage market had contracted last year.