Why would a Trading education firm sponsor a Chinese female chess player?
That’s a question we asked ourselves when we recently heard of Tradimo backing Hou Yifan. Now to be fair, Hou Yifan is not just any chess player. She is a chess grandmaster and current Women’s World Chess Champion – at age 22 the youngest ever to win the title – as well as being the youngest female player ever to qualify for the title of Grandmaster.
And, she is a very popular figure in her native China, including on all-important Chinese social media.
We asked Tradimo CEO Sebastian Kuhnert about one of the more interesting Forex Sports Sponsorships we’ve covered. Here is what he had to say.
[divide]
LR: Hi Sebastian, and thanks for joining us today. We’ve seen a lot of sports sponsorships lately in the Forex world, but Tradimo’s backing of Women’s Chess World Champion Hou Yifan is somewhat different. Can you let us know more about the decision to go with a chess player as brand ambassador – and a female chess player at that.
Sebastian Kuhnert, Tradimo
Sebastian: We have a successful track record in targeting niche communities with targeted messages.
First, we aimed at educating professional poker players with faster paced forex trading; then we launched strategic investing with the best European Starcraft player, Grubby, and now we are celebrating the launch of our open education platform https://learn.tradimo.com and aim to reach more Chinese people by working closely with Hou Yifan.
High quality education for trading, investing as well as personal finance management and chess are a fantastic match, because both can be considered intellectual challenges requiring logic, passion, dedication, emotional discipline and hard work on the professional level or can be considered very beneficial hobbies for those who practice it. Hou Yifan is an especially good fit, because not only is she the number 1 female chess player in the world, but she is only 22 years old and the most popular mind game player in China with a reach beyond 4 million fans in social media.
LR: This is much different than having the Tradimo brand on a soccer player’s jersey or racing car, which would be seen by thousands of young adult male demographic fans at least once a week. How do you see the branding value here for Tradimo?
Sebastian: Branding Tradimo as the learning platform of the Chess World Champion helps us on our trajectory towards institutionalising our education. We want to be the preferred financial learning platform for universities and business schools as well as banks, brokers, financial advisors, trading coaches, investment and personal finance experts as well as ambitious and experienced users and also offer certificates for learners. All this requires credibility beyond mere content quality. Content quality is the pre-condition, but high quality brand-associations help pave the way further.
LR: Will Hou Yifan be involved in specific activities on behalf of Tradimo?
Sebastian: Hou Yifan will learn to trade, invest and diversify her own assets with Tradimo’s instructors and high quality courses in a mix of live broadcasted webinars and blogged learning reports all of which culminates in a trading and investment challenge that sees her team up with her fans on a social trading platform and achieve a profit of EUR 100,000 together. Those that invite other fans and their friends to https://learn.tradimo.com/yifan.html as well as those that contribute the most to the joint profit goal, get to come to Beijing for a week of financial learning seminars, fun activities and dinner with Hou Yifan. She will furthermore comment one of the men’s chess world championship matches for us in a live broadcast – such broadcasts can get several hundred thousand viewers at times – and share her journey in social media.
LR: In this and indeed other sponsorships, how do see the ROI? And how can you measure it?
Sebastian: I expect a direct and an indirect impact. The direct impact can be measured concretely through the sales of the learning course that we are going to publish that contains all videos, lessons, recordings and materials of Hou Yifan’s financial learning journey with Tradimo and the account openings during the trading challenge. The indirect impact is the branding benefit that should be reflected in higher conversion rates, more social media sharing, new partnerships attracted through surrounding PR activities and an overall traffic increase over time and cannot be measured with 100% precision since the rest of the business will not seize its other innovation activities.
LR: What else can we expect to see from Tradimo in the coming months?
Sebastian: We’re in advanced talks with one of the world’s leading business school regarding courses on Tradimo and are expanding our partnerships in each of our markets (English, German, Chinese, Russian and Arabic), both when it comes to new courses for our learning platform, scholarships provided by companies that allow students to get free access to selected courses on Tradimo as well as for for our award-winning mobile game Little Traders.
Moreover, we’re exploring the development of joint learning programs together with high quality financial software providers such as market scanners to offer a joint suite of high quality research tools and corresponding education.
Other ideas we’re currently experimenting with are online and offline live seminars together with selected financial institutions & brokers and integration of courses from the Tradimo learning platform in other platforms.
In terms of the breadth of topics represented on the Tradimo learning platform, we meanwhile cover not only daytrading, stock & ETF investing and forex, but also many personal finance courses and soon even real estate investment content.
All in all, we want to be the best place for financial educators to reach those interested in financial knowledge. All our activities are aiming towards that.