Olympics are Massive Opportunity for Retailers

It might be more than two years away but retailers should at least be looking to get their heads around the 2012 Olympic Games because it represents a one-off opportunity to bag a chunky amount of extra sales.

Attending this week’s 2012 Opportunites for Retailers conference was an interesting experience if only for the statistics it threw up. Just consider the nine million tickets due to be sold, the one million additional visitors to London, the 220 countries broadcasting the event, andd the 4.7 billion expected TV viewers.

What this boils down to in terms of additional sales up for grabs during the Games itself is £3 billiion, which could multiply up to £10 billion when you take into account the pre and post event activity. This is big stuff and represents an opportunity for retailers if they can work out ways to link their businesses to the Games.

But there is a big beware here – and it concerns the use of Olympic ‘marks’ such as the five rings logo and the weird London 2012 Olympic logo thingy. The Olympic movement takes these things very seriously. Clearly you cannot use the rings (shown above, just in case you hadn’t seen them before) without being a sponsor. But there are many more images and word combos that are also out of bounds.

Courtesy of a big time retailer I’ve kindly been sent some of the brand restrictions that are imposed on merchants. It runs to some pages but here’s a flavour.

The following expressions are prohibited:

Any two of the words in list A OR any word in list A with one or more of the words in list B below:
A
– Games
– Two Thousand and Twelve
– 2012
– Twenty Twelve

B
– London
– Medals
– Sponsors
– Summer
– Gold
– Silver
– bronze

So it would seem the use of ‘Bronze 2012’ is out, which is bad news for any sculptors looking to advertise their bronze artwork for sale in 2012. Clearly if you don’t want to lash out loads of cash to be a sponsor then you have to be a little creative. But such are the opportunities thrown up by the Olympics that it must be well worth committing some time to getting those creative juices flowing.