EURONICS INTERVIEW


July/August 2022 ertonline.co.uk


‘We’re proud of the communities we serve, and passionate about supporting grass roots football’


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ERT speaks exclusively to Michelle Wicker, Brand Marketing Manager at Euronics UK. E says.


ngland made history last month when England’s Lionesses beat Germany to win the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 and brought home the country’s first major trophy at a senior level since 1966! They played in front of a record 87,000 crowd on home soil at Wembley Stadium, where many from the electrical retail sector would have recognised a familiar name.


Euronics was one of the tournament’s key sponsors, and here, Michelle Wicker, Brand Marketing Manager for Euronics UK, tells ERT why supporting and promoting women’s football in a major new sponsorship deal was so important to the group. “We have localised our activity so it’s meaningful for our members, our suppliers and our employees,” she


“They can be proud of communities we serve.” Q&A


Q: Euronics International was an official partner of UEFA Women’s Football. Why did you strike up this partnership? What was the appeal? Michelle Wicker: There’s an international story and a local one. Firstly, we were incredibly pleased to become a sponsor – it gave us lots of opportunities to talk about things we care about, like showcasing equality, promoting health and wellbeing, building confidence and self-image, and driving positive social change. We believe that women’s football and grassroots girls’ football can do those things and we think


it and the


Euronics agents can help with that. It will also strengthen our relationship with our members, and we want to help them serve their local communities. We know that women’s sport – football, in particular – is gaining huge interest, so it’s great timing. We’ve also taken the campaign down to grassroots level and it’s all about community as some of our members have stores that have been handed down through generations. We’ve localised our activity so it’s meaningful for our members, our suppliers and our employees – it’s great for them! They can be proud of it and the communities we serve.


Q: Did you have a good response to the initiative from the members? Did they get involved and get stuck in? MW: Absolutely! We’re encouraging members to sponsor local girls’ and women’s football teams. That’s where we’ve had a huge impact – better than we thought we would. At the Euronics Showcase in April we created a Fan Zone, which was very celebratory of our sponsorship. We had a football shootout and tricks with Taylor MacDonald from Reading FC Women – she engaged the crowd. We also had the UEFA Women’s EURO trophy there, a football mascot and an ‘activation book’, showing members how they could get involved. All our staff were dressed in football shirts, too.


It really got the message out there – we had over 100 Euronics agents who registered that they were interested in sponsoring a local team and 62 of them asked for our help to get involved. We’re over the moon.


We’ve also run two pilot schemes with members – Albany Radio, which is sponsoring the Ware Youth FC U11 girls’ football team (pictured below), and Pooles Domestic with FC Britannia.


Q: So what marketing activity was there during the tournament itself, and around the final? MW: Our logo was shown during the games, we updated the livery on our lorries, we had ticket giveaway competitions on social media and we also ran two radio competitions, with Heart and Absolute Radio, for people to win family tickets to the final. There was also POS – some of which linked to products, like ‘The Ultimate Game Night’, with TV and audio and we had a theme called ‘Together We Are Electric’, which is based around the spirit of team, with a nice play on words to tie into our electric appliances. The group posted on social media a lot as well and, with everything we’re doing these days, we encouraged our members to take part as much as they could. We offered a gift voucher to the winner of those sending us their pictures of their displays on Facebook.


The campaign certainly got louder as the weeks went on, and we are confident that the momentum of support around women’s football will continue to grow!


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