SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Four 15-minute quarters. The occasional overtime. One bountiful corporate fiscal quarter.
This is what Super Bowl 50, kicking off Feb. 7 at Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., will deliver to retailers all over the country, but particularly those in proximity to the stadium.
All North American convenience retailers selling food and beverages stand to benefit from the big game’s largesse. But imagine owning a convenience store 2.7 miles from the event—as Robinson Oil does. In preparation for the big day, the company just unveiled its strategy for a Super Bowl merchandising program at its Rotten Robbie stores, reported Convenience Store Products.
While Robinson has a smattering of smaller Rotten Robbie stores, its location on Lafayette Avenue in Santa Clara closest to Levi Stadium is 3,400 square feet. Every last yard of selling space can be fully optimized to capitalize on all types of sales—excluding souvenirs of the respective teams, which the chain doesn’t plan to stock.
Chalk it up to lessons learned from past mega-event experiences.
“I learned a lesson from the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles not to sell memorabilia-like trinkets and key chains, which we tried and it didn’t pan out,” said Kris Kingsbury, marketing and merchandise manager for Robinson’s Rotten Robbie chain of 34 stores. “For this game and others like it, the fans tend to buy those types of things at the actual event.”
But what they do buy is beer.
Rotten Robbie is unveiling a 185-square-foot beer cave in the Lafayette store stocked with Budweiser varieties at an everyday low price of $12.99 for 18-packs.
“All of our stores will be in a festive mode, shall we say. We have upped the ante as far as POS [point of sale] and merchandising with stores in the vicinity,” Kingsbury said.
Levi Stadium holds 75,000 people and local hotels will be at maximum capacity. “Economists have calculated the economic impact of past Super Bowls to be close to a half-billion dollars for the hosting region,” she said, citing Inside, the city of Santa Clara’s newspaper.
One of the c-store chain’s challenges will be taking the larger merchandiser plans from the Lafayette store and replicating them in smaller stores.
For example, the chain will use a 3-D “sunscreen wrap (sponsored by Pepsi-Cola) showing the iconic Golden Gate Bridge for upper parts of the store windows,” Kingsbury told Convenience Store Products. There will also be larger floor decals and pennants in the Lafayette store that will be proportionally sized to fit naturally in smaller stores.
Of course, Kingsbury would be remiss without broaching the “Power of Three’s” influence on the big game. Frito-Lay, Pepsi and Budweiser—all three brands are heavyweights, and as a bonus they have the right to use the term “Super Bowl” in their promotional materials without facing trademark infringement because of their position as NFL brand partners.
The basket ring for the Super Bowl is 67% higher when Frito-Lay, Budweiser and Pepsi products are involved, Kingsbury said. There will be 39 million cases of Budweiser beer products sold, and, as for local lodging, “shabby hotels are going for $300 a night so we expect to have more traffic than normal,” she said.
Other types of products that Kingsbury says will be in hot demand for tailgating are Frito pies and doughnuts.
In assessing the magnitude of the event on Rotten Robbie, Kingsbury sums it up this way: “We don’t consider that this will necessarily be a ‘silver bullet’ but we should have some pretty nice increases compared to other Super Bowl years.”
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