Introducing our new dedicated website is a way of giving something back to our loyal supporters in Asia. It is a positive step to identify the needs of our worldwide supporters.
Arsene Wenger, Arsenal's manager
The Sunday Times, Business, UK 12 Feb 01
 

DesignerCity's help in launching asia.arsenal.com has proved an important milestone for AFC Broadband's globalisation strategy. Your dedication, attention to detail and local knowledge have helped make this launch possible. Your team has displayed boundless energy and shown a 'can do' attitude in helping us to develop the site. Your sensitivity to the local culture and market is a key asset in giving asia.arsenal.com both a globalised and localised flavour. We are pleased that our main goal of being the first Premier league side to launch in Asia was met. With DesignerCity HK as our web partner, we at AFC Broadband are confident that the site will be well taken care of and that it will continue to be successful.
Steve Green, CEO, Arsenal Football Club Broadband, 19 Jun 01

 

Beating Manchester United, Arsenal FC became the first English Premiership football club to launch the official Chinese version of its website. The Arsenal Asia Chinese site provides thorough news and information of the club, almost the same as its English counterpart. It illustrates Arsenal's vision and dedication to the Asian market. We believe in the short future, other football clubs will follow Arsenal's  step in setting up Chinese websites, in order to explore and materialise more commercial offerings. Coming to Asia will no doubt be on top of the agendas for some top English football clubs.
Apple Daily Newspaper HK, 5 Mar 01, translated
 
New Arsenal Asia 2002/03
 

Goto: asia.arsenal.com

Case Study - Arsenal Asia

First in Asia
With the success of the initial launch of the Arsenal website and thereafter, Arsenal with Designercity has continued to lead the way to advance the overall cause of the Internet with another 'first', this time Designercity HK  have pioneered asia.Arsenal.com -  the first Chinese  portal  site for  a  major  European football club with a  base  operation in Hong Kong.

With Arsenal.com receiving over 80,000 unique visitors per week and almost 10% of the existing traffic coming from Asia, it was decided that this massive interest in both Arsenal and Premier League could not be ignored. With Designercity and sister company, Designercity HK as the lead agency, Arsenal again forged ahead in February 2001 and became the first Premiership League Football Club to launch a Chinese version website in Asia. We assisted in helping Arsenal globalise and expand into Asia and then consult them on localising the website to meet the local demands in terms of local flavours and tastes.

The strategy
Once again, proving the theory - that if you are the first to market with a strong proposition you can create the right mindset within the business to stay ahead of the competition. It is also believed that you need to constantly push the envelope to create success.

On continuing with tradition, Asia.Arsenal.com provided its supporters in Asia with:

  • The first live online Chinese game commentary in  Asia during the Arsenal versus Bayern Munich game
  • The first bilingual (English and Chinese) live chat  with Arsenal Captain, Tony Adams
  • Organised the first offline Arsenal marketing event  with live game telecast
  • The first offline co-promotional event to take Arsenal  into China PRC

    The execution
    At the end of March 2001, Designercity HK hosted a live chat with Tony Adams. With a large population of Arsenal supporters in Asia who are unable to understand English, the site set up the first bilingual chat. This allowed the Asian supporters to  be able to participate and ask their football hero personal questions on his expectations and career as well as bringing an Arsenal icon to a more personal level.

    Designercity HK believe that just having an online presence alone without coordinated effort offline will not ensure the website's success. The Internet is ever changing and the Arsenal Asia team of Designercity HK needs to explore all the possibilities to ensure maximum efficiency on reaching

    I want to express our sincere thanks for all the hard work and effort that you, and the DCHK team, have invested in the asia.arsenal.com site since its inception. The quality of, and swiftness with which you have delivered content requirements, has been greatly appreciated and I hope that we can continue to improve and build on this relationship.
    Suzanne Case, Project Manager, AFC Broadband, 04 Jul 01

     a new level of information distribution. In April 2001, Designercity HK decided to further promote Arsenal and its new website by bringing it offline. The team organised a first-ever gathering of Arsenal and Liverpool supporters in Hong Kong to view the live telecast games of the semi-finals FA Cup. The two semi-final games played between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur  and  between Liverpool and Wycombe Wanderers captured an audience of over 200 fans. This offline event exercise helped solidified Arsenal support to lead the way for the next move on establishing an Arsenal supporters' club.

    As a follow up to the semi-finals FA Cup event, Designercity HK also organised the Arsenal versus Liverpool FA Cup final gathering in May 2001. The event is a co-promotional exercise with a top China sports newspaper with 1.4 million weekly readership and a China sports portal site with a daily hit rate of 2 million. As part of the region-by-region strategy, the FA Cup event will serve as a test bed for future expansion of local event gatherings in China as well as allow for further penetration into the China market.

    The penetration
    Apart from penetrating into China, other expansion opportunities were also being explored. One such opportunity was the much anticipated signing of a Japanese J-Leaguer, Jun-ichi Inamoto, to the Arsenal rank. With the imminent signing, Designercity HK began to develop a dedicated micro-site attached to Asia.Arsenal.com. In under a week the Japanese version micro-site was rolled out to coincide with Inamoto's joining to the Arsenal rank as mid-fielder in the latter half of July 2001. The site offered facts and figures on Inamoto as well as other downloadable web-based features. The site, targeted at the Japanese market featured a bilingual chat forum in English and Japanese and also a link to Arsenal's commerce engine offering exclusive Inamoto merchandise such as his No. 19 Home Jersey. The micro-site will serve as a probe to see whether there is a market for Premiership League Football in Japan.

    The future
    With the start of the new football season, Designercity HK rolled out a new Arsenal website in August 2001. The site, sporting a fresh new look continues to offer the content that so many fans are used to seeing. It will also plan on incorporating commercial elements into the site later on in the year and allowing fans in Asia to purchase their favourite Arsenal branded merchandise.

    With Designercity HK's step-by-step controlled and planned strategy the team will take Arsenal  to  new dimensions:

  • 1st Stage - Community building exercise
    2nd Stage - Introduce an e-Commerce platform into the Chinese version website
    3rd Stage - Lead Arsenal into new media development with convergence of Internet and broadband TV technologies

  • Arsenal with Designercity HK, will continue in its quest to not only establish a 'Gunners' community but to ultimately create a truly international football community.

    The fact
    asia.Arsenal.com was launched in February 2001, which had drawn a wide coverage from the local press in Hong Kong and other S. E. Asia areas. Apart from appearing on some top newspapers and magazines, it also made an appearance in an CNN special news report.

    The site has been gathering traffic since day one and has an encouraging pattern of growth. The site now has more than 6000 local fans putting in their email addresses and has more than 800,000 page views and 40,000 unique users per month. Since the launch of the Inamoto Japanese site and the new season version, the site's traffic has been more than doubled.

    The systems
    In order to help the site function more efficiently and allow building relationship with local fans more effectively, Designercity has custom-developed a range of back-end systems including the site content management and online fans relationship and community management system as well as an online survey and realtime statistics report system which was used for the Liverpool FC online global survey recently.

    2003 - The Story continues
    With a series of good results followed by another historic Double from Arsenal Wenger's wonder team in the 2002 season, Arsenal Asia has gathered together a tremendous increase in site traffic leading to the World Cup Finals held in Korea and Japan. The site by then had provided statistical figures that Arsenal and Granada would consider as a strong proof for their Asian strategy.

    DesignerCity kept its feet on the pedals and pushed forward for the proposed strategy of the next phase development, which will be essentially the much anticipated commercialisation approach. Yahoo's success in partnering FIFA for the online official World Cup site prompted DesignerCity's initiative in working together with the biggest portal of the world. After a few months of detailing the partnership, DesignerCity has successfully brought together two great names from two different industries separated by six thousand miles, Arsenal Football Club in London and Yahoo! Hong Kong, Asian regional headquarter of the Internet giant based in the US.

    With the partnership in place, Yahoo! Hong Kong is managing the marketing, promotional activities, and sponsorship opportunities for organisations wishing to advertise in the website. The portal giant is providing the hosting and technical infrastructure for the site under the guidance of DesignerCity. DesignerCity is in charge exclusively to produce and to manage the site as well as providing both translated and special localised content. Both DesignerCity and Yahoo! Hong Kong are working hand in hand to make Arsenal Asia another wonderful victory for the club in this part of the world, and this time in commercial style.

    Updated facts
    asia.arsenal.com's latest statistic shows a continuous growth in traffic. Number of page views have surpassed the 1 million mark each month with a respectable 80,000 monthly unique visitors logging on to their club's Chinese website.

    URL: http://asia.arsenal.com

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