Doosan:
Building Success Through Sponsorship
At Octagon, we know that driving brand awareness through sponsorships is more than just perimeter boards or names on shirts. Finding the natural fit is our forte. Back in 1982, Doosan Group, South Korea’s foremost construction, technology and innovation business founded the baseball team OB Bears, the first professional Korean baseball team and the first to win the new Korean Baseball Series. And so a partnership with Major League Baseball in the U.S. made a lot of sense.
We’ve had a continuous relationship with Doosan which began at The Open Championship in 2010. But our work for Doosan in the U.S. started in earnest in 2016. Our new remit began with analyzing the contemporary U.S. market and competitive set for the Doosan Group and delving deep into its industry set.
For the next step, we developed a rigorous brand comms strategy to get Doosan’s message straight to potential and existing customers in North America. This led to building Doosan’s brand awareness, consideration, purchase potential and advocacy with Doosan’s equipment buyers for the following five years. Ultimately, we needed to get decision-makers to buy Doosan’s products using brand awareness through authentic passion points that the audience could easily relate to.
Understanding brands is what we do. Our rigorous insights and research-led discovery process included analyzing Doosan’s own brand research, positioning, target consumers, and business and revenue streams.
But our methods go deeper.
To get under the skin of the stats, we applied our own target syndicated research, profiling Doosan’s target consumer passion points and preferred consumption channels. We conducted competitive assessments with full reports on the competition’s activity. We looked for the white space where Doosan could own clear turf away from their competitors, including from outside of their product set. We spoke to Doosan’s own stakeholders to get the insights straight from the dugout. We pitched our proprietary Property Strength Index (PSI) to prioritize prospective comms platforms against criteria we identified during discovery. We used our PSI, combined with Doosan’s objectives to deploy an investment strategy with a measurement framework to ground investments in tangible business returns.
This deep and specialized research led us to recommend that Doosan partner with Major League Baseball and the New York Yankees in exclusive branded platforms, media and experiential assets. We cut the deals and negotiated the contracts.
Among other successful activity, Doosan saw exclusive and first-time-ever partner logos on-field, along the baselines, on the pitcher’s mound, and TV exposure through electronic virtual signage screens on FOX and MLBN at the ALDS and NLDS games. Along with post-season MLB-themed commercial spots and hospitality, MLB.com homepage and MLB Club takeovers in digital and social media, Doosan’s presence saw significant lifts and were able to achieve their overall awareness goal in just the first 18 months of activity.
By the end of 2019, we’d also helped Doosan achieve or exceed sales targets.
You could say we hit it out the park.