HAPPENING NOW | Two Brands, One Tournament, Two Ways to Win at Retail

The FIFA World Cup is live. An estimated 89 million American adults are watching, and 38% of them plan to buy alcoholic beverages specifically for match occasions. That translates to billions in retail spending concentrated into a single tournament window. 

For beverage brands, this isn’t background noise. It’s one of the most concentrated purchasing occasions of the year. The brands showing up in-store right now planned for this moment months ago. 

Here are two programs we recently designed and delivered for the tournament. Different brands, different categories, different retail strategies. Same principle: build the program around the event, not the other way around. 

Casillero del Diablo took an unexpected approach. A full floor display built around soccer culture with the national team crest, bold colours, and tournament-ready graphics. 

Wine isn’t the first category most people associate with soccer. That’s what makes this smart. When every beer brand is fighting for the same FIFA shelf space, a wine brand that shows up with a display tied to the same cultural moment stands out by default. It’s an unexpected category play in a window that most wine brands ignore entirely. 

The floor display format works here because it creates a destination. Shoppers walking past a wine section during FIFA aren’t thinking about wine. But a branded floor display with national team colours and soccer imagery pulls them in on an occasion they’re already emotionally invested in. 

Carlsberg needed in-store visibility during the World Cup without a full floor display commitment in every account. We designed soccer-themed pole toppers that put the brand at eye level in key locations. Soccer ball integration, Carlsberg green, built for quick deployment across multiple retail formats. 

Pole toppers are one of the most underused formats in event-driven retail. They’re fast to produce, easy to ship flat, simple to install, and visible from the aisle without taking up floor space. For a beer brand competing for attention during the world’s biggest soccer tournament, that combination of speed and visibility is hard to beat. 

The format also gives brands flexibility. Pole toppers can be placed in accounts where a full floor display isn’t approved or practical. That means broader reach across more stores with less production cost per unit. The product does the rest. 

These two programs represent different retail strategies for the same event. One is a statement piece built for high-traffic accounts. The other is lightweight, scalable, and designed for broad coverage. 

The right choice depends on the brand, the account list, and the budget. But the wrong choice is always the same: showing up with generic shelf material during a window when your consumer is paying more attention than usual. 

Beer brands have understood this for years. The Super Bowl, March Madness, NHL playoffs — beer activates around every major sporting event with purpose-built retail programs. What’s changing is that spirits, wine, RTDs, and functional beverage brands are starting to do the same. The consumer occasion doesn’t belong to one category. It belongs to whoever shows up for it. 

A display program for a June tournament needed to be in development by January. The production timeline for both of these programs followed the same path: creative brief and concept approval, structural design and prototyping, print production and quality control, warehousing and kitting, distribution to accounts, and in-store setup timed to the tournament opener. 

That’s a five to six-month runway. The brands planning for the next major retail window — NFL, NHL, college football, the OND holiday stretch — need to be in motion now. 

Two different brands. Two different categories. Two different formats. But the same fundamentals: planned months in advance, designed around a specific event window, built for specific retail formats, and timed to hit the floor when consumer interest peaked. 

The brands that win during major sporting events build programs around the calendar. 

OND planning starts now.