How to win the World Cup?

Strategies and tactics on promoting through a major sporting event

The tournament grows "battleground categories" substantially, but net growth comes from base demand, not your promotion, and because everyone discounts at once, the deals largely cancel. You promote not to win, but to avoid the decremental loss of sitting out. The real opportunity is the "open goal": adjacent categories like dips, mixers and ice that ride the same occasion uncontested. Capture demand before it perishes, load the pantry before kick-off, know whether the event is yours to win, and spend where it grows the brand, not merely defends it. 

It is the night of a big match. Across the country, fridges are filling with beer, trolleys with crisps and dips, and living rooms with people who do not usually eat and drink together. For a month, one fixture list shapes what millions of shoppers buy, and when. Few events move the grocery basket like a World Cup, and the surge lands in a predictable set of categories — beer, soft drinks, snacks, ice cream — on a predictable set of nights.

The instinctive response is to support that demand with deeper deals. For most brands it is the wrong one. When every competitor is already shouting, adding your own megaphone is an expensive way to stand still at yesterday's share.

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Three findings should change how you plan

The first is uncomfortable. Look closely at a World Cup promotion that everyone called a success, and most of the extra volume turns out not to be new demand at all. Break the uplift down into what shoppers actually did, and nearly all of it is competitive switching, retail switching and your own cannibalisation — people who would have bought the category regardless, now buying it from a different brand, in a different shop, or in a cheaper pack of yours. In a recent analysis of one such event, almost none of the promotional uplift was genuinely new consumption. Yes, the base grew thanks to increased overall demand, but promotions did not add much. The brand had paid, at depth, to move existing volume around and to discount shoppers who needed no discount.

The second is counterintuitive. The best place to win is usually not where the fight is. While every beer and crisp brand discounts into the same crowded aisle, the categories that ride the very same occasion — the dips, the mixers, the ice, the party bakery — are barely promoted at all. The demand is real, the shelf is uncontested, and a shopper assembling a watch-party basket adds these on top of the normal shop rather than swapping one brand for another. That is the open goal, and it holds the cleanest and cheapest incremental volume of the entire tournament.

The third is a matter of timing. Treat the event like an aircraft on the runway: once the plane has departed, an empty seat earns nothing, and that revenue is gone for good. Tournament demand is just as perishable, because you cannot recover the occasion once the final has been played. The value is therefore captured before and during the event, never after. In many categories the single most effective play is not the deal during the final; it is loading the shopper's pantry in the quiet build-up, while the shelf is still uncontested.

The decremental, not the incremental

All of this provokes a fair objection. If the discounts cancel, and the deal creates so little new demand, why promote in the battleground at all? Because the danger does not sit on the upside. It sits on the downside.

The World Cup does grow the battleground categories, and substantially. But that growth sits in the base: more people, more occasions, more consumption for a month, with or without your deal. Your promotion rides on top of that larger base, so promotional volume rises too, but only in proportion. The deal is no more powerful than usual; it simply has more to work with.

Now picture being the one brand not on deal and not on display, in the very weeks when shoppers buy most. You do not merely forgo an incremental gain. You suffer a decremental loss: share that walks to the competitors who did show up. In a crowded window the incremental is small and shared between everyone; the decremental is large, and it is yours alone.

That is the real logic of the battleground. You match the deal to defend, not to win, because the alternative is a loss you cannot afford — and you look for genuine growth where the aisle is not yet crowded.

None of this means sitting out the World Cup. It means knowing whether the event is yours to win at all, and how hard to play if it is. Two questions decide that. What is your objective — to capture incremental demand and maximise volume, or to protect margin and preserve the return on investment for the games still to come? And where do you stand on the field — the category leader who can dominate the aisle, or a challenger who would lose a straight fight on price?

The answers place every brand in one of four groups, and each group plays a completely different game. Part two sets out the map: which categories should lean in and which should quietly reallocate their budget; what to do before, during and after the event; and how a challenger can beat a far bigger rival without ever matching its discount.

Some of what the data shows is obvious, some is remarkable, and a little of it is genuinely counterintuitive. We have flagged each as we go.

Two questions before any plan

Start with the objective, because it changes how hard you should play, not only where. During a major event, promotional pressure peaks across the whole category at once. That is precisely when competitive switching is at its maximum: with every brand on deal at the same time, habitual loyalty is suspended and the shopper simply buys whoever is cheapest or most attractive that night. The brand with the most scale and visibility captures the largest share of that switching. If your goal is share defence and volume, you have to show up. If your goal is profit, restraint is often the better trade, because the incremental volume in a crowded window is expensive and largely borrowed.

Then establish your position on the field. A category leader and a challenger face the same event with completely different options. Confusing the two is the fastest route to margin destruction. We return to this below.

The map: four groups

Two axes decide where a category sits. The first is consumption expansion: does the event genuinely grow the category, or not? The second is promotional intensity: how heavily is the category discounted during the window? They are independent, and the interesting categories are the ones where they diverge.

The battleground (obvious) is where the herd lives: beer, soft drinks, salty snacks, ice cream and, increasingly, energy drinks. Demand expands hugely and everyone promotes.

The open goal (remarkable) is the group most plans overlook: dips, party food, ice, bakery, mixers, and the rising canned-cocktail and hard-seltzer segment. These categories ride the same viewing occasion as beer and crisps, but they are not promotion-bombed, so share of voice is cheap and incrementality is clean.

The reflex promoters (counterintuitive) are the trap: coffee, tea, ready-to-drink coffee and tea, and summer personal-care lines. They discount heavily across June and July, but the lift is driven by the summer calendar, not the match schedule. Event-level depth here funds volume that would have arrived anyway.

The bystanders are home care, laundry, pet care and most personal care. Neither lift nor clutter applies. The event is not their occasion. Most categories are per-capita non-expandable and will not even benefit from increased traffic (their aisles may actually be overlooked).

One finding underpins the whole map. When we decompose the promotional uplift of a typical event promotion into its behavioural sources, very little of it is new demand. In a recent holiday analysis the uplift broke down as 68% competitive switching, 20% retail switching and 12% cannibalisation, with almost no genuine category expansion at all.

It is worth pausing on what those numbers mean, because the sources are shopper decisions, not accounting lines. Competitive switching is the shopper whose loyalty is suspended for the week, buying whichever brand offers the most attractive deal. Retail switching is that same shopper taking the trip to the retailer with the loudest offer. Cannibalisation is your own buyer trading into the promoted pack they would have bought anyway. None of those three is a new mouth or a new occasion; it is existing volume changing hands. Only category expansion — a shopper consuming more than they otherwise would, because the event created an occasion that did not previously exist — is volume the category did not already own. A deep deal in a crowded window buys a great deal of the first three behaviours and very little of the last.

What to do, group by group

Battleground. You can neither out-discount the field nor afford to disappear. During the event, depth cancels out in the clutter, so an incremental discount largely subsidises volume you would have sold anyway; but the occasion is too large to cede. Match the category's table-stakes mechanic to hold your feature and display, then win on visibility, pack and occasion rather than on price — larger formats, multipacks and cross-category bundles that convert the occasion into category expansion. The strongest play, though, comes before the event: load the pantry with your brand while clutter is low, so that your shelf presence sells through at full intent once the matches begin. After the event is the danger zone. High stockpilability means a deep post-promotion dip, and promoting into it re-subsidises stock the shopper already holds. Pull back on price, let the baseline recover, and harvest margin. If you must stay active, stay non-price.

A note on display, and this is the counterintuitive part. Display is normally the decisive lever; a strong offer from shelf is overwhelmed by a merely good offer on display. During a major event, however, nearly every brand carries display support. Display therefore stops being a differentiator and becomes the cost of entry. That has a sharp implication for challengers, below.

Open goal. Lean in. This is where the money should go. The strongest single play in the whole matrix sits here, before the event: there is real party stock-up demand and almost no competitive clutter, so you capture the loading uncontested. During the event, ride the occasion that the battleground is paying to create — cross-merchandise into their footfall, with dips beside the crisps, mixers beside the spirits, and ice at the front of store. The shopper is assembling a watch-party basket, and these are add-on purchases that sit on top of the normal shop rather than substituting for a rival. Because competition is thin, even modest promotion converts that behaviour into genuine category expansion rather than subsidised baseline, so the return is structurally better than in the battleground. After the event, the rule splits by format: fresh, low-stockpilability lines such as dips and bakery carry only a shallow dip, so continued promotion captures residual occasions cheaply, while ambient, stockpilable lines should pull back like the battleground. And capture canned cocktails and seltzers now, because that segment is migrating into the battleground and the thin-competition advantage is closing.

Reflex promoters. Do not ride the event. The lift is calendar-driven, not match-driven, so event-level depth pays for volume that would largely have arrived regardless. Hold or cut your depth and frequency; because incrementality is low, the volume you forgo is small and you recover margin. The contrarian move is to harvest margin precisely because competitors are discounting irrationally. There is little to manage afterwards, because you were not building real demand and the dip is modest. Use the window to test whether the summer intensity ever paid. One caveat: a genuinely weather-driven line, such as iced coffee in a hot tournament, drifts towards the open goal — diagnose before you prune.

Bystanders. The event is not your occasion, and themed packs return nothing. For a multi-category manufacturer the only real decision is reallocation: move the budget to your battleground and open-goal brands, where it can actually work. Maintain distribution and shelf presence, and do nothing more. There is no after to manage, because there was no dip. Treated correctly, the bystanders are the funding source for the rest of the matrix, not an equal claimant on summer spend.

Leader versus challenger inside the battleground

Once you are in the battleground, your position on the field decides your tactics.

The leader plays for volume and foreclosure. With the scale to absorb low margins on high volumes, the leader uses trade spend and joint business plans to lock down physical real estate: fortress aisle-ends and front-of-store displays, cross-category bundles that pair the sharing pack with the matching drink, and oversized tournament SKUs promoted hard before kick-off. A shopper with three giant tubes in the cupboard is out of the market for the next three match nights. That is the point.

The challenger cannot win that fight and should not try. Penny for penny against the leader on a football weekend, the challenger loses. The answer is asymmetrical. Poach a different occasion — premium hosting and daytime viewing rather than the rowdy night-in. Use value-add rather than price cuts, with extra-free packs and high-perceived-value sweepstakes that protect equity instead of training the shopper to wait for a discount. Move spend to the digital shelf and quick-commerce, where there are no aisle-ends to lose and the field is level. And use flanker limited-edition summer flavours to pull impulse trial: the shopper buys the baseline pack from the leader and grabs the challenger's novelty as the exciting extra.

RGM lever	Category leader	Challenger brand
Primary goal	Defend share, block visibility, maximise volume	Protect margin, poach premium niches, drive high-value trial
Pricing	Deep, highly visible discounts to drive floor volume	Hold the premium; use value-add and bonus packs, not deep cuts
Retail visibility	Monopolise aisle-ends and secondary displays	Dominate the digital shelf and quick-commerce; eye-level in-aisle
Assortment	Mega-sharing formats and cross-category multipacks	Standard sharing sizes with disruptive limited-edition flavours

This lens also reframes the open goal. A challenger is far less foreclosed there, because the aisle-ends are not locked down. That is another reason the open goal is the efficient place for a smaller brand to play.

The blog post continues after this infographic.

A note on time zones

The World Cup is hosted across North American time zones, which pushes European viewing later into the evening and night. Expect a pronounced shift from out-of-home to in-home consumption: fewer pub occasions, more living-room ones. That favours larger sharing multipacks of beer and ready-to-drink, frozen and convenience meals, and late-night savoury formats, and it should lift quick-commerce demand more sharply than a tournament played on European soil. This is an expectation grounded in the broadcast schedule and in prior in-home shifts, rather than a measured figure.

The practical consequence is an occasion split that your promotional mix should respect. The daytime social occasion is single-serve, premium and chilled. The night-in occasion is multipack, ambient and bulk-sharing. Leaders will own the night-in. Challengers should consider poaching the daytime.

The verdict

Obvious:  In the battleground you must be present, because absence at the moment of peak consumption is fatal.

Remarkable:  The largest efficient opportunity is usually the open goal — categories that ride the event but are not promotion-bombed, where clean incremental volume is cheap to win.

Counterintuitive:  Matching the herd's depth, and fighting for the same display, is often the worst use of money. The win comes from timing, occasion and position, not from discount.

Winning the World Cup is not about shouting the loudest. It is about knowing which place your brand has on the field (expandability x promo intensity), which sources your volume is really coming from, avoiding decrementals, capturing the demand before it perishes, and refusing to pay for the volume that was always going to arrive.

Based on the Accuris Benchmark and the Source of Business® methodology.

Note: The observations in this article draw on the Accuris Benchmark, which holds promotional and consumption data for 44 categories over many years, including the last World Cup, the 2024 UEFA tournament and a range of other sporting and seasonal events.

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