Damien Wilson | COURTESY

A professor’s job can be seen by outsiders as the career goal of talented educators. However, the teaching role is just one part of an academic’s career responsibilities, and the need to keep informed about contemporary advances in one’s field of expertise is an ongoing motivation. The constant drive to ingest the latest revelations, and to incorporate updates in research findings can be draining, especially if the topic of expertise is in a field of scant interest outside the hard-nosed enthusiast. 

Professors at Sonoma State have expertise in subjects like sports marketing, public relations, and wine business across our five schools. At a superficial level, it would appear there is little intersection of these disciplines, but then again, sometimes researchers with an open mind and vision for enterprise just get lucky.

As domestic markets become saturated over time, the prospect of expanding internationally becomes a strategic business consideration. Some sports have grown beyond national borders with overwhelming success. While some of the world’s highest-profile soccer players can find their names on jerseys in far-flung locations, other sports like Gaelic football are barely known outside of the country in which the sport was first played. A business parallel is exemplified by wine producers. While Champagne is recognized globally as the pre-eminent sparkling wine, how many have heard of the ‘world famous’ Sekt, despite numerous, long-term efforts to extend that wine’s footprint beyond national borders?  

On March 2 this year, when a sport emerging from England in the late 19th Century was played as a non-exhibition game in Las Vegas for the first ever time, its likelihood of success in international expansion began in earnest. For those of you having never heard of  Rugby League, here is a brief summary of the sport: On a field that’s roughly the size of an NFL field, two teams face each other and one will run with ball at the opposing team, with the intent of breaking through the opponent’s line, to ground the ball in the defending team’s end-zone. The player with the ball can choose to try and get past their opposing defender, kick the ball over the line of opponents or choose to pass the ball backwards to a teammate in a better position. If the player with the ball is tackled, he is obliged to stand where he was tackled, and play the ball with his foot to the player behind him. The team holding the ball has six such tackles to try and breach the defending team’s end-zone. While much of that description may sound familiar to fans of NFL, so how could the NRL expand into the U.S. market?

Let’s take a comparison with a wine brand’s expansion into US markets. By reviewing a recent, successful entry into the US by French wine company, Pernod-Ricard, there is some insight into the conditions necessary in expanding beyond national borders. In 1975 the Pernod family merged with the Ricard family’s businesses to form the company, Pernod-Ricard. Having subsequently merged and acquired such global brands like Absolut and Chivas, the company’s expansion led to interest in leading brands in growing markets. By 2015, Pernod-Ricard was one of the world’s largest wine companies, and despite having iconic Champagne and wine brands from around the world in its portfolio, the company did not have a presence in the US market.  

Successful entry into the US wine market would require satisfying a number of important conditions.  Pernod-Ricard analyzed the US market, and identified the opportunity for a large brand to capture organic growth across wine  markets, nationally. Pernod-Ricard’s image as a premium brand owner dictated that the company needed to produce a wine brand with large enough production volumes for national distribution across the US, but not so large as to render the brand to fight for market share in the bulk wine market. The company recognized that trying to create a new wine brand would not work. Pernod-Ricard identified Korbel’s Kenwood Vineyards brand, with its 500,000+ case production as being one of the best options for acquisition. 

Kenwood Vineyards was a brand familiar to the US market, with a long history of production, and it is located in Sonoma County, one of the highest value wine producing regions in the US. Pernod-Ricard recognized that Kenwood Vineyards’ wine production had elements for success. The company bought Kenwood Vineyards, and refocused the brand’s architecture to match the growing markets in the US. Familiar branding with the existing name leveraged consumer awareness, but the new branding emphasized a contemporary focus on market appeal with a new look.

How does this successful example of brand expansion in wine apply to the case for Rugby League? 

The wine brand owners entered the US market with a clear plan in mind, and a strategy relying on utilizing capacity to supply the market. Pernod-Ricard’s sheer size enabled the provision of sufficient financial support. They purchased their way into an existing market with a known degree of brand awareness, sufficient latent demand, and an existing distribution network with access to points of consumer purchase led to the brand’s successful entry into the US. Rugby League is one of the most popular sports in certain countries, it is only in a small number of nations. However, Rugby League attracts some of the largest TV audiences of annual sports telecasts in countries like Australia and New Zealand. This provides the NRL with the financial impact, and broadcast network access to work on the necessary brand awareness of the sport in the US. The recent game in Las Vegas was organized to take place in conjunction with a series of tournaments and an inaugural sporting combine, attracting local athletes to try-out the sport. The question remains whether there is sufficient interest in the sport in this new market. With a crowd of 40,746 attendees at the initial game on US soil, did spectators enjoy the event to warrant committing interest in the game? 

Rugby League’s effort to spread beyond its original national boundaries rely on enough similarities with a familiar sport, while being different enough to appeal to a sufficient audience. When Rugby League first expanded outside of Great Britain into the colonies, the sport of Rugby Union was the familiar benchmark in those markets.. The likelihood of success is going to depend on the sport’s capacity to generate enough appeal to enough of an audience. How well this appeal was generated can be compared with other attempts to extend beyond national boundaries. As Sonoma State’s Professors are finding out, there are valuable lessons that the Internationalization of sport can learn from the wine business.