The partnership between Rockstar Energy Drink, a PepsiCo brand, and Live Nation, the global live entertainment company, is no passing infatuation. It’s a marriage made in music festival heaven.
It’s a multi-year deal that encompasses six major UK festivals – Parklife, Wireless, TRNSMT, Reading and Leeds, and Creamfields – that provide a perfect platform to engage Gen Z audiences, increasing brand awareness, loyalty and adding tangible value for the most discerning fans. The new collaboration builds on Rockstar Energy Drink’s existing partnership across all Academy Music Group venues.
“This is the first time we’ve brought the whole ecosystem together – scalable, of stature and multifaceted. It’s complex to manage but exciting,” said Sarah Mahoney, marketing manager of UK beverages at PepsiCo, in a fireside chat with Ashley Stevenson, VP of account management at Live Nation UK, at Campaign’s recent Brand Experience360.
“Live Nation has worked with PepsiCo for more than 20 years,” said Stevenson. “And this is a really good example of how our relationship has evolved. It’s very much about two businesses coming together in a strategic way to help each other.”
Strategy: more than marketing
According to Mahoney, there is a danger that communication in the food and beverage sectors can be overtly functional. “Using strategic partners particularly in music – and also football – is critical to make our brand part of the cultural conversation,” said Mahoney. “It’s important to understand the full fan journey. It’s not just about turning up and doing a really good job in the field on that day. Nor can this just be a badging exercise.”
Mahoney estimates that approximately 100 people across PepsiCo, including agency partners, are responsible for delivering the partnership, but hundreds more are invested in the success of the relationship. “If you go into it thinking this is a marketing-to-marketing conversation, you are mistaken. It takes a village,” she said. Stevenson added: “It's really interesting to see how you use it as a tool the length and breadth of the business.”
Music: the great unifier
PepsiCo is already heavily involved with football and music but for Mahoney, herself a keen football fan, music offers a point of difference. “Music is by far the number one passion point for the audience we’re after,” Mahoney explained.
“There’s nothing greater than the live experience across both football and music but music is just a universal language. There are territorial divides in sport that make it so exciting but there’s a unifying appeal to music in those festival moments where you're all in it together, 100,000 people singing along to the same song.”
Partnerships: why less is more
Mahoney’s view is to pick your partner and go deep. “Our macro ambition is to own music,” said Mahoney. “We invested in one partnership with Live Nation’s festivals and venues because they’re the experts in the category that most aligns with our customers' interests. From experience, we know that close, long-term co-creation and collaboration leads to invaluable partnerships, insights and ideas.”
Both Stevenson and Mahoney spoke enthusiastically about the “synergy” between Live Nation and Rockstar. Stevenson talked of “educating our business about what we have to do to move these mountains”.
But a partnership like this does require serious resource allocation and other business if it’s to be done well.
Fan first: understand your audience
It may seem obvious but it’s vital that the two businesses are strategically aligned. “You do see some naming partnerships that just don’t make sense,” said Mahoney, “but this is a high-energy brand for a high-energy environment.”
And that means engaging fans each step of the way along the journey which comprises four phases – discovery, planning, experience and relive – from the moment they start thinking about getting festival tickets through to the post-event glow when they’re sharing photos and memories with their friends.
“We do a lot of research on our fans and the journey that they're on,” said Stevenson. “What are a group of friends talking about ten weeks out from the festival? It might be travel planning, what they’re going to wear, make-up...”
Mahoney added: “You’ve got to engage them upfront. We’re trying to build a long-term music conversation here, an always-on conversation.”
She also cautioned against “over engineering” where marketers can obsess about brand experience when “people just want a phone charger and somewhere to sit down. It’s vital to truly understand their needs so that it’s fan-first not brand-first.”
And ultimately, that fan-first message is the key. Live Nation and Rockstar have obvious synergy but it’s only by investing time, thought and resource to understanding your aims and your methods that a partnership can be more than the sum of its parts.
For more information on how to partner with music festivals and venues, reach out to David Pepper, SVP of Live Nation marketing partnerships at David.Pepper@LiveNation.co.uk