Sponsorship, branding and Byron’s big mistake
Please read this if you’re interested in how sponsorship changes brand perception.. This post wraps up a number of loose ends – so goes on a bit, sorry. Following a recent podcast, Ian Thompson, a sponsorship measurement expert, scoffed in a blog at the idea of brand value transfer – namely, that the values of […]
British Cycling’s shell game
British Cycling and Shell’s announcement of their eight year sponsorship hasn’t landed well. According to the PR, British Cycling and Shell will share a commitment to ‘supporting Great Britain’s cyclists and para-cyclists through the sharing of world-class innovation and expertise; accelerating British Cycling’s path to net zero; and helping more – and wider groups of […]
#101 What is sponsorship?
This is the first of Sponsorship 101 – a series of posts intended to provide an excellent foundation for anyone interested in, or starting off in sponsorship. We’re all exposed to sponsorship, pretty much every day of the year, but the sponsorship 101 question is : what is sponsorship? My first conscious exposure was age […]
Why sponsorship?
Why sponsorship as your marketing strategy? As we wrote in our post Great Sponsorship Strategy in 8 Steps, the first step towards great sponsorship is to define your strategic challenge. But this exercise in itself links to a fundamental question: why sponsorship as your marketing strategy? To ask this question is perhaps a discriminator for […]
We ❤️ sponsorship storytelling
Sponsorship storytelling was originally published in December 2015. Making sense of Father Christmas It’s that time of year again – and the question: is Father Christmas real? It’s not my question of course but my son’s. And although my wife – who’s from a country which doesn’t believe in the first place – wants to […]
Just do it
‘How to murder your wife’ was released in 1965. It tells the story of cartoonist Stanley Ford, played by Jack Lemmon, who stands wrongly accused of murdering his wife. Lemmon’s character uses the defence of justifiable homicide. The pivotal scene takes place in the courtroom. Ford conducts his own defence, and with his best friend […]
A Christmas story
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. (sweet-factory) 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 […]
Corporate identity
It’s funny how corporate identity as a phrase is associated with just about the most rigid of branding questions: making sure a logo always looks the same. Because identity in a psychotherapeutic sense is anything but rigid. In fact, current thinking views identity more as a fluid process rather than a rigid structure: we never […]
Purpose-led sponsorship
Purpose-led sponsorship is a recurring theme on this blog, and reading Trinity Mirror’s new study on consumer trust last week reminded us our blog on purpose in 2014. The study reports the unsurprising figure of 43% of consumers claiming to mistrust brands and 69% claiming to distrust advertising. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy there but more interestingly, the research […]
Alfred Kelly’s big decision
McDonald’s exit from sponsorship at the TOP echelon of Olympic partnership created a media opening for anti-IOC narrative. But the sponsorship issue that McDonald’s exit raises is not about the travails of the IOC, it’s about whether or not the sponsorship of both the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games can be justified – […]
CR Campaign-ability
The Body Shop remains the paradigm buster. Its campaign, Stop violence in the home, originating in Canada, wasn’t based on the usual passion drivers. Instead, it addressed the taboo of domestic violence, a subject which at the time even western governments would barely acknowledge. And from that counter-intuitive platform, it launched a campaign which by […]
Brand purpose and sponsorship
There’s a close relationship between brand purpose and sponsorship, but…. Whatever happened to vision? It used to be a fundamental part of how businesses described themselves. I grew up with it…. Nowadays though, business vision is really hard to find. It’s been well and truly eclipsed by brand purpose. How a CEO responds to the […]
Ubiquity is the real elephant in the room
The new Lib-Con government is talking a big game on the topic of binge drinking. How this impulse manifests itself remains to be seen, but we are right to be twitchy about the recommendations contained in the Health Committee First Report on Alcohol (HC151) and the prospect of alcohol sponsors being told – you’re barred. […]
Projection and brand theory
In our research for ‘Working the Olympics’, we came across a fascinating insight into the Olympic brand. Terrence Burns, formerly of the IOC and up to recently President of Helios Partners, was sharing his experience of running the IOC’s first brand audit: ‘At the time we did the un-prompted word association research, there was only […]