Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Zoran Avramović, Marketing Director, football club Crvena zvezda
When his shoes first appeared, Michael Jordan said “I can’t explain it, and no one can explain it. To me, it’s much bigger than Michael Jordan. It’s going to outlive me in terms of what I did for the game of basketball.” If you put things in simpler terms, which is something that the great masters and creators of the market trends from Nike always knew how to do, this example once again confirmed the rule that the brand is no longer what we tell about it to the customer, but what the customers (fans) say to each other. It might seem paradoxical, but it is indicative when Kylian Mbappe on the official “Jumpman” page (brand worth about $2.2 billion) says about the collaboration of PSG and Nike: “They have history, we have history, but together we create a new history.”
The impeccably selected nineteen-year-old “Parisian saint” – who has already entered the history books – is only the second teenager to score goals at the World Championships and with a strong identification with the great Pele, is in a way the announcement of this new history. This confirms the rule that the brand is not a product, not a logo, not a trademark. But the logical question then is: What is it then? Jordan, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $1.65bn, said he cannot explain it, or rather that no one can.
Still … I would daringly claim that a brand is the dream of those who create it, and the experience of those who consume it, without even being aware of it. We are all mental customers (fans) because we identify with the emotional value of the brand (club), or rather don’t buy, but seek exactly what we want. And that is an identification with the brand (club), which, though unattainable in the real world, is viable through the experience. Charles Revson summarized it once: “We make cosmetics in the factory, we sell hope in the store”.
The owners of the PSG have sold hope to all their fans that they will be the best club in the world, but also seriously hinted that dreams can come true. This confirms another rule – that nothing has been done before being dreamt before.
Jumpman, a direct association to Michael Jordan, was chosen as a symbol of sport and business success. The owners of PSG strive for the same. Their innovation is that, conditionally speaking, they have selected a basketball idol with six NBA titles. This points to another rule by which football takes only the best. The owners of PSG have gone a step further. Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, president and CEO of PSG, offered a courageous, bold and extremely creative way of capitalizing on the avant-garde approach to turning PSG not only into a large, successful football club, but also into one of the biggest sports brands at the City of Light from which it originates. The fact is that everything that is worth something in football is happening in Europe, and the Champions League is the crown jewel of that value. And right through the Champions League, the idea of synergy between two brands, two sports, football and basketballm was launched – an idea that is undeniably historic.
In the meantime, Michael Jordan has allocated $275 million for the NBA franchise’s acquisition – the Charlotte Hornets. Very soon the club was worth $700 million. How much the princes and heads of the PSG had paid Nike, or other details of their agreement, is still unknown. We need to wait until the end of the Champions League and then look at the stock exchanges to see the value of the Jumpman brand. No matter what the nominal amount is, the European football is getting a new amalgam on the business side: the Air PSG!
(Zoran Avramović, marketing director of Crvena Zvezda, has so far written five books: “The Football Industry”, “Football – Global Religion”, “Football comes First”, “Football, the Heart of Millions” and “When the Game Ends, War Starts”.)
