Given the importance of the moment – Starbucks took a big bet with veering away from their usual seasonal communications to cater to the incoming flood of tourists and residents celebrating the World Cup. This meant that we were the only region to steer away from the festive red cup communication.

Our challenge is that only 49% of consumers agree that they drink coffee while watching football games (Source: UM x Starbucks Coffee Research). While coffee is currently not top of mind of consumers, how can we leverage the moment to best position Starbucks as the place to be during the World Cup. The hub for where international and cross-cultural fans can group and interact whether that be before matches (when they need the caffeine kick for the long night ahead) or after the matches (when they relive the best or sadly, the unfortunate moments of the night!)

We took up a local insight own-able by Arabs, and only Arabs. Arab commentators tend to be more emotional than European or American ones. They don’t just take their audience through a descriptive comment of the game, but also through all the emotions that come with it. Be it hype, joy, sadness, worry, anxiety; they’re with you through it all and can condition the spectators’ mood. Their signature move is prolonging their words like “goaaaaaaaal”, “shooooot”, “scoooooore”, “miiiissssss”. People also host commentator challenges amongst each other. To bring that to life, we implemented the same tone of voice in our campaign. We applied the same branding to the iconic starbucks white cups, leading to the microsite game experience - aiming to offer an omni-channel experience.

Target audience: a mix of Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X categorised into three buckets:

- Explorers: appreciate constant change in coffee shops and even expecting innovation in both coffee and food, have high awareness of coffee shop trends and have FOMO –often try limited seasonal items, are actively seeking updates and novelties, will listen to the barista and can be swayed to try something new/different.

- Traditionalist: coffee is ‘sacred’ across all occasions and it’s ‘impossible to change’ this, may try something new on the trust of a close friend as a temporary move, slightly more open to changes in food choices.

- Occasionalists: morning coffee is ‘sacred’, however, prepared to explore options, lean slightly more towards Traditionalists in the morning, and more to Explorers in the evening, personalization and customization is a route to incremental spend.

Approach: popping up in the palm of their hand

For the cups:

-Stages of the process: creative conceptualization, design and craft, local and global layers of feedback/approval, artwork, production, distribution, internal communication.

-2 months in design phase, approx. 2 months in production and distribution phase.

-Available in over 1,110 outlets across 9 markets in the MENA region.

For the microsite:

-Stages of the process: creative conceptualization, digital development, design, local layers of feedback/approval, production, digital integration, dispatch.

-3 months for digital development and production.

-Available across 9 markets in the MENA region.

-Reached 73M users across platforms and 9 markets.

-Across platforms we surpassed both platform and industry benchmarks – some even 3x or 4x higher than normal.

-The campaign was successful in generating engagement especially across our new channels and formats. More importantly – we were able to move the needle in terms of brand metrics – ad recall, brand & ad awareness, favorability and action intent. The biggest win for us are the moves in purchase intent across Gen Z and Millennials – the two priority audiences for the brand – with an 11pt and 6pt uplift respectively. Even in a period of heavy competition and clutter, the World Cup was a successful moment to advertise and build brand awareness. While the numbers speak for themselves, the change in brand attitude to upper funnel or affinity based communications (outside of their usual seasonal campaigns) was an even bigger success.