Olympic Sponsors Cheer the Home Team

Western businesses are harnessing Olympic fervor in China and playing up national pride in their advertising campaigns

McDonald's China launches the sponsorship logo for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games at a 2005 ceremony. STR/AFP/Getty Images

By Chi-Chu Tschang

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As a sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, McDonald's (MCD) has built most of its global marketing campaign around the idea of people from all over the world coming together in a festival of sport. The company's ads exhort people to "Celebrate Olympics with McDonald's." But within China, where pride in hosting the games is running high and feelings are sensitive because of the Tibetan protests and the Sichuan earthquake, this universalism gives way to something else. For its Chinese marketing, McDonald's dispenses with appeals to unity and friendship and instead focuses on cheering for the home team. Its slogan in Chinese is "wo jiu xihuan zhongguo ying." The translation: "I'm loving it when China wins."

The nationalist campaign demonstrates the company's "deep-seated commitment to the people of China, the Chinese government, and the Chinese Olympics," says Jeff Schwartz, McDonald's China's chief executive officer. "I think that's going to resonate very, very strongly with all the Chinese consumers."

For multinational corporations like McDonald's looking to profit from the games, the most favored marketing tactic is piggybacking on China's pride in hosting its first Olympics. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad has broken sponsorship revenue records thanks to companies eager to build their brand awareness among China's 1.3 billion consumers. And companies have decided that as far as those consumers are concerned, the Games are about China.

Advertisers Stroke the National Ego

"These Olympic Games are going to be more of a national celebration than any other Games that we have witnessed by far," says Alexandria Oikonomidou, director of Ogilvy Sports, the Olympic and sports marketing practice of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Beijing (WPP), who previously worked for ATHOC, the organizing committee for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. National pride, adds Li Li Leung, managing director of Helios Partners China, an Atlanta-based sports marketing firm that counts Lenovo, BHP Billiton (BHP), and Snickers as clients, is "the most important value that the Olympic movement [has] for the Chinese people."

As a result, a number of multinational corporations have launched China-only campaigns to stroke Chinese egos. Hence the McDonald's campaign, which had 1,200 people do the "I'm loving it when China wins" cheer for five minutes at the National Olympic Sports Center on Apr. 23. Pepsi (PEP), which is not an official Olympic sponsor, has launched a viral online "Love China" campaign. TV ads and billboards from Adidas' (ADDDY) "Together in 2008, Impossible Is Nothing" campaign show images of the entire Chinese nation rising up to support Chinese athletes who will be competing in the Olympics. "We wanted to create a campaign that touched the mood of the Chinese people," says Erica Kerner, director of Adidas' Beijing 2008 Olympics Program. That nationalist theme emerged "based on what we were hearing from consumers and what we were hearing from the athletes."

What Will the West Think?

What about the possibility of a backlash in the rest of the world? Multinational executives hope there is little risk in playing the nationalism card in their Olympic marketing campaign. The campaigns are in Chinese and run only in China, minimizing the danger they'll be perceived in the West as "selling out" to the Chinese.

For multinationals, latching onto China's national pride is part of their localization strategy. "Chinese people like to make 'foreign friends.' This extends from a person to a nation. They are so proud of their country that they appreciate anybody or any nation that goes out of its way to be 'friends of China,'" Jing Wang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture, wrote in an e-mail interview.