Maui Jim’s alliance with Manchester United, formed at the start of 2019, raised a few eyebrows in the optical world. Why would a Hawaiian sunglass brand strike up a partnership in football and how does that help optical practices sell more frames?
The alliance was never about a specific sport but rather awareness, recognition and desire for the brand. To change people’s mindset by creating an association in the public’s psyche between a powerful lifestyle choice and eyewear. Maui Jim believes the best way to achieve that is by targeting relevant groups and building those associations, not by bombarding them with route one advertising, but through influence at lifestyle touchpoints. Maui Jim says this is what drives consumers through the sales process funnel from awareness to consideration and on to trial and purchase.
Influence, particularly among younger users of social media, is a sought after currency and the tie up with Manchester United is just one of a number of ways Maui Jim is seeking to achieve it in sport and beyond. The Manchester United link is just one of many projects Maui Jim is pursuing, both in sport and beyond, to create awareness and demand. The idea is to influence buyers, through lifestyle experience and social media to engage with the brand and put it on their list when considering a sunglass purchase. The Manchester United project gives an interesting insight into how that works.
If you think football is all about beery blokes watching a match on a cold, wet Saturday afternoon, think again. For clubs at Manchester United’s level the ground, Old Trafford, is more akin to a retail or theme park than a muddy sports field. Those not familiar with Old Trafford will find it hard to appreciate the sheer number of people, not just passing through the turnstiles, but also queuing at the cash desks in the Manchester United Megastore. Each year Old Trafford attracts 3.4 million people making it the biggest tourist attraction in the north-west. Even on a non-match day large numbers of fans come for a tour of the ground, an experience that ends up in the Megastore. On match days 18,000 people could go through the store and on non-match days anything up to 5,000 and for the last year those consumers have not just been buying Manchester United shirts but Maui Jim sunglasses.
A Manchester United branded Maui Jim sunglass
Historical value
James Holroyd, director of merchandising at Manchester United, is responsible for the Megastore. He talks proudly of the club’s history, its conception in 1878 as Newton Heath and the effect these things have on its brand value today. Its history has shaped the community and family values of the club with its academy approach and the foresight to develop a 75,000 seater stadium in the early 1990s. All sterling stuff but what is the relevance to optics? Holroyd says the history gives Manchester United’s estimated 1.1bn fans and followers worldwide a strong emotional attachment they want to buy into. That reach is also helped by the fact that the Premier League is one of the most popular sporting competitions in the world, with United as one of its top clubs and football being a sport that features a high frequency of activity, generating 3.4bn live TV views each year for the club. Elements of the Maui Jim-Manchester United tie up, such as pitch side digital advertising boards, are seen around the world by fans of every club United plays at home.
Holroyd says its merchandising is different from other clubs. ‘We have a high value approach,’ he says. To illustrate this he points to the Paul Smith and TAG Heuer Concessions within the Megastore. The latter features a £4,600 Manchester United edition watch that illustrates the potential for bespoke branded accessories. The club has worked elsewhere with Adidas in footwear to deliver bespoke products that fans feel are part of their lifestyle. ‘93% of fans say supporting the club is part of their identity. That’s an incredibly powerful statement,’ says Holroyd. He says the club spends a lot of time working to understand their fan customers in order to deliver bespoke products that meet their needs, be that kit celebrating the Chinese New Year, a Paul Smith tie or Asian fit sunglasses.
In the year since the launch of the Maui Jim venture, research has concentrated on consumer dwell times at the Maui Jim stand to better understand which styles fans like and their buying habits. ‘If it’s over 30 seconds we assume they are a potential buyer.’ Surveys show that since the launch the fans’ preference for sunglass brands has seen Maui Jim’s share increased to 18%. While Maui Jim is for sale in the Megastore the partners recognise the venture is not fundamentally about onsite retailing at Old Trafford. The central idea is to create influence and place brand awareness in the mind of the buyer so when they come to purchase sunglasses Maui Jim will be uppermost in their minds.
Regular line up
It is also not just about Manchester United liveried product. To fulfil the variety of fit and style needs the Maui Jim area features a range of styles across the company’s portfolio. On show are bespoke Manchester United products, co-branded products and special treatments such as a Manchester United red mirror coating, but the majority of frames are from Maui Jim’s regular line up. ‘It’s a hard initial sell,’ says Holroyd with the practicalities of the match day rush, the price point, size and style considerations all making it more likely that those interested will eventually go to an optical retailer to purchase the desired frame. ‘They won’t expect to see Maui Jim in the Megastore so they might want to have a longer think about it because it’s a big purchase. That offers a great opportunity for retail opticians,’ if they use the point of sale to make the association in store, says Holroyd. ‘We are delighted that we got into it [the partnership]. It’s innovative, it’s exciting, it’s quality and it brings theatre into the store.’
The Maui Jim concession within the Old Trafford Megastore
‘The sale will actually quite often happen in the optician,’ agrees Martijn van Eerde, senior director of marketing for Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific at Maui Jim. He says learning from the project has been interesting with the styles chosen by some of the young players coming as a surprise. Some prototypes used during an immersion session, where players get to try the product, were put into production and the enthusiasm for the product was high. ‘We had to physically stop one of the players taking the frame away with him,’ jokes van Eerde.
He says this is all great for expanding the brand into new areas by both reaching buyers through social media and gaining understanding of the product they want. ‘From the February launch to the end of October Manchester United frame sales totalled $2m. ‘That’s a lot of product,’ says van Eerde.
The football venture sits alongside Maui Jim’s sponsorship of the ATP Tour in tennis and the European Tour in golf, which ‘makes us relevant in three buckets,’ according to van Eerde. He is aware that sunglasses are an impulse purchase on which the economic weather weighs heavily but is confident that if people try on Maui Jim they will end up buying so the search for more ‘buckets’ continues.
‘It’s all about expanding the brand,’ says van Eerde. ‘We want people to know Maui Jim exists so when they are considering sunglasses they will think of Maui Jim.’ One route is saturation marketing and product placement in lifestyle situations like beach clubs, ski resorts or yacht races. ‘They won’t buy the product there and then but when they are back in the market for sunglasses they will think of Maui Jim.’ Another area is social media influencers. Whether the influence is sport, style or music van Eerde says it is really about lifestyle and mindset and understanding that ‘all our buyers are not old, male and rich.’
By building influence Maui Jim says it can drive awareness and by working with retail opticians it can help them tap into that awareness at practice level. ‘Opticians can benefit from this by trusting us,’ says van Eerde, ‘our reps know the styles that can sell, if it doesn’t the optician gets their money back.’