As in all French professional clubs, OGC Nice has its marketing and communications department led by Eric Roy, a former star of French and local football. His sports career took him from Nice to Toulon, through Lyon, Marseille, Sunderland (England), and Rayo Vallecano (Spain), finally ending his athletic journey in Nice from 2002 to 2004. After hanging up his cleats, Eric Roy joined the staff of OGC Nice, taking charge of the club’s communication and marketing image, assisted by Virginie Rossetti for communications and Frédéric Mattei for merchandising, while Laurent David handles the commercial side.
However, becoming responsible for marketing and communications isn’t improvisational, and the operations conceived in recent months are not numerous. Indeed, the communications have become considerably structured, especially towards the media, under the leadership of Virginie Rossetti, a real information platform for the red and black house. But it is in the marketing sector where the weakness lies. A golf tournament that went completely unnoticed and a directory of partners are the only significant operations that have come from the team responsible for promoting the club. Autograph signings in shopping centers or fast-food restaurants are not sufficient to properly “market” the club’s image.
On the sponsorship side, it’s a bit of a no man’s land, and the club’s last partners (Takara, Gorenje, Ubaldi, or Rica Lewis) came through the intervention of President Maurice Cohen. When you consider that, for example, Olympique Lyonnais’ sponsorship accounts for about 25% of the club’s budget and that marketing and merchandise bring in more than 30 million euros, one can only dream of a much more optimized management of a Gym’ lacking brand image. Indeed, the French Riviera is teeming with large companies and groups that could find a real advantage in communicating through OGC Nice as well as through its merchandise.
As for merchandise, there is a large margin for progression if the shops are full of jerseys, balls, or t-shirts of all kinds (when they are not out of stock as sometimes happens during the year). Yet many avenues remain unexplored, such as creating a cable television channel or a web TV, although the work provided by Konio Production on the official website is of excellent quality, organizing sports and extra-sports events, or optimizing the OGC Nice web platform (SEO, live matches, advertising management, etc.).
At a time when accounts are made and unmade within OGC Nice and football issues fade, the time seems to have come to conduct a real audit of the human resources that make up the club’s extra-sports environment in order to build solid foundations for a reconstruction as healthy as it is sustainable.
Certainly, as the saying goes, criticism is easy and the art is difficult. Mr. Roy, be a good prince in accepting it.
