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Sports Marketing Scottish Rugby Marketing

How Scottish Rugby is selling the thistle to the world

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By Tony Connelly, Sports Marketing Reporter

September 29, 2016 | 6 min read

Scottish Rugby wants to secure its longevity at the top of the sport with a commercial strategy that aims to familiarise its brand of the game in emerging markets such as Japan and the US in order to open up commercial partnerships and revenue streams.

Scottish rugby

Scottish Rugby

Scottish rugby could not be in a better place at the moment and as such its organisers are scrambling to capitalise on that good health. The governing body has posted record turnover for the last three years following the launch of a commercial strategy focused on ticket revenue, broadcast agreements and lucrative sponsorship deals with big names like BT.

The three areas are intrinsic to how most sports names generate their revenue however the momentum of the rugby’s surging popularity off the back of the last World Cup has led Scottish Rugby to adopt an ambitious new approach which is pushing the brand into new territories in a similar fashion to how many Premier League football properties are successfully doing.

“We’re working particularly hard at globalising our brand and taking our thistle internationally,” says Dominic McKay, Scottish Rugby’s chief operating officer.

One of the two main regions the international push will focus on is Japan, where McKay believes Scotland can become the “second team” for Japanese rugby fans.

The popularity of the sport in Japan has coincided with enthralling performances on the big stage, including one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history when Japan beat South Africa at the 2015 World Cup. The country’s performance at the tournament captivated audiences at home too, generating record breaking TV viewing figures with 25 million people staying up to watch their team’s third fixture against Samoa.

Such an appetite for the sport offers up fertile ground for commercial chiefs, particularly given the country will host the next Rugby World Cup in 2019, marking the first time that a country outside of the “rugby heartlands” will hold the tournament.

This is where Scottish Rugby is ahead of the game thanks to what McKay calls a “concerted effort to strengthen relations in the region and develop strategic commercial relationships with corporate Japan”.

In pursuing this ambition, Scottish Rugby partnered with Japan Rugby Union, meaning the Scottish team will travel to Japan each year to play fixtures and will work closely with their coaches and playing staff. The idea behind the partnership is to increase support for the brand in the region and portray it as a commercially attractive and marketable commodity.

This co-operative relationship has already helped market Scottish Rugby in Japan and subsequently opened up new revenue streams for it’s clubs including Mitsubishi becoming a sponsor of the Edinburgh Rugby team.

“Recently we had a raft of elite business people coming over to Scotland for a trade visit which we hosted as part of a signing ceremony for another partnership which we’ve just made with the Japanese city of Nagasaki,” says McKay.

“There are a number of significant big businesses who have an interest in rugby there [in Japan] and we see that as a great opportunity to develop a broader sponsor family there.”

Broadcast deals in the region are also playing a part in strengthening the brand’s popularity in Japan and wider Asia.

“We spent time with the Japanese broadcasters when we were out there this summer and we’re in discussions to get more of our content beamed into Japan to promote the brand of Scotland in Japan ahead of the world cup,” explains McKay.

“At the moment we already live-stream some of our games on YouTube so our intention is to make some of that content available in Japan ahead of the World Cup and for instances where our international fixtures aren’t being broadcast in Japan we'll make them available through our online Scottish Rugby channels.”

The attempts to build an established fan base in Japan seem to be paying off to an extent given that Scotland’s second highest market for kit sales is now Japan. To take capitalise on this demand it is working with its kit supplier Macron to open a Scottish Rugby shop in Nagasaki.

The other main region Scottish Rugby is working hard to crack is the US, where fans are embracing rugby like never before. Scotland will play fixtures in the country but the commercial strategy’s focus is to secure the right television deals. McKay reveals the Scottish Rugby has held discussions with the likes of ESPN and NBC to make sure the fixtures are being shown in the right territories.

A major asset for the Scottish Rugby’s expansion into the is Rugby Sevens, a variant of the game that invented in Scotland, and so there’s a potential to tell an origin story and vocalise Scotland as the home of one of the more modern brands of the game.

“Rugby Sevens is a very easy game for the North American market to embrace and we see it as being a very important tool to utilise in selling our brand there,” says McKay.

The Sevens iteration of the sport moves at a fast pace and is pitched as a more accessible form of the game for newcomers. US audiences have also been more receptive to this format since it has some familiar faces in it from the NFL. The USA’s Rio Olympics men’s team for Rugby Sevens included New England Patriots safety Nate Ebner.

As well as selling the Sevens game, Scottish Rugby is also in discussions about the possibility of developing an Atlantic league with teams from the Guinness Pro12. For this, McKay says the governing body would follow a not too dissimilar approach used by Manchester City’s owners, City Football Group, which would see rugby chiefs set up US based franchise.

Time will tell whether the idea becomes a reality, but in the meantime McKay maintains “We will keep challenging the norm and look for new revenue streams abroad which we can reinvest back into the game at home”.

Sports Marketing Scottish Rugby Marketing

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