A Christmas story

JD-tree

Jack Daniels’ Christmas advert shows a 26’ Christmas tree made entirely of whiskey barrels, covered with Christmas lights, surrounded by people. It’s the first time they’ve done it, according to the ad copy. The lead line: It’s not what’s under the tree that matters, it’s what’s around it. The tree is in the main square of their home town, Lynchburg, Tennessee where, one imagines, JD is the favourite tipple.

The bit we like best: it’s only 26’ tall. Any self-respecting PR agency would have been looking, at the very least, at a Guinness Book of Records entry – but thankfully this is not PR, this is storytelling. Christmassy.

What’s this to do with sponsorship?

One of the discussions we manage, in trying to help brands understand exactly how much freedom they have to interpret the concept of sponsorship, is around platform, precisely because sponsorship is just one of many.

For some brands, such as Apple, product is platform: from a marketing perspective, this is absolutely the sweet spot, because you’re already a part of their lives. In Apple’s case, and a number of typically artisan products, where development and production remain labours of love, the integrity of the product commands its own fascination and respect: Ferrari also sits here. Neither brand has much need of sponsorship.

Jack Daniels’ storytelling creates a brand platform out of its own distillery, and relationship with the local community, engaging consumers in its values and personality.

Other brands use the environment or ethical credentials as a platform. The Body Shop proved beyond doubt that campaigns, about the environment, social issues, fair trade or even sex slavery, can provide a brand platform as powerful as any.

Many brands rely on their advertising creative. Rainey Kelly’s cartoon world and sonic branding for Lloyds TSB differentiated the brand from its competitors and created a gentle fictional world which is easy to insulate from the hard knocks of daily life and customer experience. Lynx never fails to disappoint with its preposterously adolescent magical reality. Cadbury wrote a short chapter, but not a book, with its gorilla.

For businesses without unique product credentials, without a strong sense of their own heritage and story and its potential relevance to consumers, without a strong or distinctive creative culture, sponsorship offers an appealing off-the-shelf solution, in principle. The challenge is: can the platform be as coherent as Jack Daniels, as visually compelling as Guinness and as relevant as The Body Shop? Because sponsorship is no more immune than any of the other platforms to failure. The thing is, you need to be very clear why you want one, and what you’re going to do with it when you’ve got it, because, if you’re not, a platform can be a very scary place.

And platforms, of course, are premised on storytelling. A platform without longevity is a sales promotion. So the art of storytelling, a respectable line of thought in brand studies, is highly relevant for sponsorship, in two ways.

Firstly, because any sponsorship has to carry a narrative, a live, evolving, coherent story, over the course of its life. Everyone in sponsorship pays lip service to the need to keep (even) a three year sponsorship alive and fresh: yet very few sponsors or agencies ever take the trouble to write the story before they buy, the meta-campaign with their annual chapters. Sponsorships negotiated without a clear sense of those chapters are likely to struggle to sustain relevance: the worst case, which we’ve all lived, is the desperate, year end search for fresh energy and momentum. Many sports sponsorships fall into this category: adidas’ sponsorship of London 2012, by contrast, offers a clearly structured campaign which builds towards an obvious crescendo.

The other approach is far closer to JD – embed the company story in the sponsorship. It might seem a superficial distinction but in practice, it’s very different and, from a communications and employee engagement perspective, far more effective. It also adheres more closely to our own principles of best practice: embedding the business in the partnership.

UPS is a notable exponent. Its full page advertisements in the UK press bring to life its promise that ‘We love logistics’ with absorbing detail: the story of warehousing 30 million pieces of equipment is not only awe-inspiring from a PR point of view, it offers a real and immediate glimpse into the world of logistics. For employees, it serves almost as mnemonic, wraps service credentials in relevance and talks to the person, as well as the procurement function. Not only does it serve to showcase competence for its B2B audience, it communicates a credible level of obsession and attention to detail – which is a key ingredient for storytelling.

It’s Christmas: we all deserve a happy ending.