Football World Cup Marketing Strategy Paper

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Task 2 Six Sigma Essay Brief

You are a Black Belt in an organisation and your marketing team want to run an advertising campaign based on people sharing birth dates with footballers.  Your boss thinks that is a bad idea as the company will be giving away a lot of products based on the quote he found.

“Analysis of the country squads in the last 6 World Cups finals (1990 -à 2010) shows that out of the 12 squads there are 20 co-incident birth dates.  (A World Cup Squad is 22 – 23 people). Furthermore two of the finals have provided 5 co-incident birth dates.”

He has asked you to clarify the situation and has set up a meeting with marketing team for you to present your findings.

When creating your report be clear about any assumptions and your rationale for making them.  Provide any supporting arguments or demographics and theories on both sides of your argument.

Consider the data and how robust it may or may not be or bias that may be present.  Try to rationalise the problem using the Six Sigma RDMAIC methodology including some form of control mechanism.

Instructions

·         The population of the audience needs to change to an actual area like London or Kent

·         The specific population needs to be defined (e.g. 10 million)

·         The assumptions made need regarding the probability rate between the footballers’ birth-rates and the audience need be more explicitly discussed in the essay and especially for how they might affect the end results

·         The DMAIC methodological process used needs to be better discussed for how each of the components relate to the hypothetical case study

·         The graphs need to be better discussed in the essay 

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Table of Contents

Introduction.. 1

The Campaign.. 2

THE DMAIC METHODOLOGY.. 3

Figure 1: The DMAIC Methodology. 3

DEFINE.. 4

MEASURE.. 4

IMPROVE.. 5

MEASURE.. 5

ANALYZE.. 6

CONTROL. 9

Conclusion.. 11

References. 12

Appendices. 13

Appendix 1. 13

1)    Birthdays of players of last 6 World Cups with Coincidences. 13

2)    No. of players having the same Birthday in each day of the year 20

Introduction

 

The aim of this assignment is to explore the application of Six Sigma on the marketing operations of a sportswear manufacturing firm. In particular, the case study focuses on the firms’ marketing option for promoting its products on the basis of people sharing the same birthdates with footballers.  By having access to the birthdates of footballers involved in the last five world cups, useful information is obtained that could be utilised for how an overlap between the audience’s birthrates could generate interest for selling its products. The firm is considering whether the implementation of such project could be cost effective depending on the probability of overlap between the birthrates shared by the audience as well as the footballers. The case study assumes that the firm’s manager remains uncertain for the actual economics benefits of the marketing activity. Hence, this report comes to address the reasons for which this marketing activity could be effective. The report makes use of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology in order to justify its argument. 

The Campaign

Football remains a popular game which is played globally and attracts the largest number of audiences.  The world cup is celebrated as a global festival and has the maximum rate of capturing audiences from any part of the globe. The World Cup took place last time in 2010, in South Africa, and ran from June 11^th to July 11^th. The event was well organized and closed with receiving huge success. The football matches were played in ten stadiums that were hosted in nine cities around the country. The final game was played at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg which is South Africa's largest city. Details about the 2010 world cup final are shows on Table 1

Table 1: World Cup Final

Date	11th July
Ground	Johannesburg FNB Stadium
Audience Capacity	84,490
No. of players in the squad for the teams playing finals	46
No. of instances of Birthday coincidences	2

Source:

Taking the 2010world cup final into consideration and analyzing from the data from the past 5 world cups, the marketing campaign discussed in this report, is targeting the 2014 world cup final. The initial marketing plan was to give autographed t-shirts to all those lucky audiences who happen to share their birthday with any of the members of the 2 teams playing. However, the plan turned out to be economically unviable. So the marketing team modified it to include lesser number of people but each getting a larger valued prize.  We will be describing the issue with the help of the DMAIC Methodology.

THE DMAIC METHODOLOGY

As Figure 1 illustrates and Yang and El-Haik (2009) argue, DMAIC represents a Six Sigma project methodology. This is a standardized and formal problem solving process that helps accelerate the rate of efficiency with which decisions are taken but also implemented in an organization. The acronym DMAIC stands for a standard set of activities which are to a) Define, b) Measure, c) Analyse, d) Improve and e) Control processes (Gygi, et al. 2005). Each stage is comprised by the performance of specific activity/task and this is illustrated on Table 2.

Table 2: The stages of the DMAIC methodology

Define	Set the context and objectives for the project
Measure	Get the baseline performance and capability of the process or system being improved
Analyse	Use data and tools to understand the cause-and-effect relationships in the process or system
Improve	Develop the modifications that lead to a validated improvement in the process or system
Control	Establish plans and procedures to ensure the improvements are sustained.

Source: Gygi, et. al. (2005, p.42)

DEFINE

The problem here is to launch a campaign based on people sharing birth dates with footballers. The campaign is expected to attract maximum audience leveraging the viewership of a world cup match especially the finals. Also the campaign should abide to the cost constraints the company is ready to fix.

 

MEASURE

Data for the birthday details for player playing last 5 World Cups are tabulated and attached in Appendix 1.

Initial Plan

Plan - Give prizes to all spectators with birthdays coinciding with those of the players playing the finals

No. of players in the squad for the teams playing finals: 46

No. of instances of Birthday coincidences: 2

No. of different birth days: 44

No. of spectators for the finals: 84490

Assuming that birthdays of the spectators are evenly distributed over the 365 days of the year-

No. of spectators having birthdays on a particular day of the year=  = 231.47 » 232

No. of spectators having birthdays in all the 44 days = 232 x 44 = 10208

Cost of T Shirt = £10

Total cost incurred = 10 x 10208 = £102080

IMPROVE

The new plan is to implement the above plan with slight modifications. In this, we plan to offer prizes to those lucky ones whose birthday falls on the same day as more than one player playing the finals. Such instances are rarer compared to the instances of the initial plan and hence offer prizes to lesser number of people while the value of the campaign remains the same. The measurement of the new plan is shown below.

MEASURE

Modified Plan - Give prizes to all spectators whose birthday falls on the same day as more than one player playing in finals.

No. of players in the squad for the teams playing finals: 46

No. of instances of Birthday coincidences: 3 (Considering average over previous 5 world cup finals)

No. of different birth days: 3

No. of spectators for the finals: 84490

Assuming that birthdays of the spectators are evenly distributed over the 365 days of the year-

No. of spectators having birthdays on a particular day of the year=  = 231.47 » 232

No. of spectators having birthdays in all the 3 days = 232 x 3 = 696

Cost of mobile = £50

Total cost incurred = 50 x 696 = £34800

 

ANALYZE

The modified plan is so much feasible and implementable. It is also very cost-effective from the company point-of-view. Implementing such a comprehensive campaign can reach to a large mass of audiences and can add value to the company. Moreover, sponsoring prizes on an event like world cup finals will give enough opportunity to the company to show its products to a larger mass of audience.

A normal distribution curve is drawn taking in to consideration the number of people having the same birthday in a year. For this purpose, the sample of the 253 birthdays of the different players playing in the finals of the world cup are used.

 For plotting the above distribution curve, the mean and standard deviation of the number of  people in the sample having birthdays on each day of the year are used.

Mean = 0.693

Standard Deviation = 0.824

Form the data collected, we have also concluded that the maximum number of players having the same birthday during any day in 4.

The above graph is a representation of the birthdays of the players distributed over the 12 months in one year. We can conclude from the above graph that the birthdays are almost uniformly distributed throughout the 12 months. This graph is generated using the information provided in the excel sheet. The information so derived is used to extract the assumption that the birthdays of the spectators will be evenly distributed throughout the year. The mean number of birthdays in a particular month comes out to be approximately 23. The coincidences in the birthdays were also plotted and the graph came out to be as given.

 The graph shows the numbers of coincidences in a year as well as in a month. In the first graph we can see that there are coincidences of birthdays of the players at least once in all the months except March, April and December. An average of 2-3 coincidences occurs in most of the months. It can also be noted that an average of 3-4 coincidences occur every year. This means that in the world cup finals matches there is a consistency in the numbers of coincidences over the years. Both graphs show the pattern between the number of birthdays as well as the numbers of coincidences. This observation has helped us in deriving the assumptions for the probability of birthdates for the 2014 world cup.

 

CONTROL

 The whole campaign needs to be launched before the official start to the world cup. Efforts should be made to advertise the offer from the company throughout the world cup matches. The modified plan and its measurement is clearly described in the above categories which needs to be implemented in the most systematic manner it can be implemented.

  

 Figure 2: The development of new process through the DMAIC approach

    Conclusion

The aim of this report has been to examine the case of a marketing strategy that is based on the probability of birthdates which are shared between footballers and the audience attending the football World Cup in 2014. The report examines whether the marketing strategy could be viable to employ by using the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology. By looking at the birates between footballers over the last five world cup finals it can inferred that 2-3 coincidences occur in a month. This report argues that because of the high number of audiences sharing the same birthday with the footballers the company needs to change its marketing strategy in order to make it economically viable. This can be done by offering prizes to individuals whose birthdates happen to fall on the same year with two footballers. This way the probability is decreased whilst the company minimises its expenditure and risk on the marketing strategy.

References

Breyfogle, F., Beckimeadows, C. (2001) Managing Six Sigma. London: John Willey and Sons

Gygi, C., DeCarlo, N., Williams, B. (2005) Six Sigma for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ.: Wiley Publishing

Salman Taghizadegan, S. (2006) Essentials of Lean Six Sigma. Butterworth–Heinemannp

Yang, K., El-Haik, S. B. (2009) Design for Six Sigma. A roadmap for product development (2^nd edition), New York: McGraw Hill