Platform really is a great name for this magazine, great because it leads away from sponsorship and into marketing.
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.
Jack Daniel’s is a wonderfully clever example, because its storytelling has created a brand platform out of its own distillery, engaging consumers in its values and its personality. While the Halifax has axed Howard Brown, Randy ‘Goose’ Baxter is still doin’ his thin’ for Jack Daniel’s.
Some brands maintain product as their platform beyond what’s healthy: many manufacturers, most obviously automobile and handsets, have left themselves with nothing very much to say beyond the story of the latest model. This is, of course, a dead end from which they will have to retreat as endless product variation ultimately ceases to be a differentiator in many sectors.
Other brands have used the environment – to greater or lesser effect – as a platform. M&S turned its environmental policies, its Plan A, into a major brand platform: integrated within the business and all communications, demonstrating responsibility, intelligence, leadership and innovation.
And of course 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. EDF, on the other hand, can’t seem to choose between Olympic hero or green energy champion: both lack conviction as a consequence.
And other brands rely on their advertising. Rainey Kelly’s cartoon world for Lloyds TSB differentiated the brand from its competition and created a gentle fictional world which is easy to insulate from the hard knocks of reality. Guinness repeatedly creates visual epics with style, grace, humour and edge. Lynx never fails to disappoint with its preposterously adolescent magical reality. The weakness with advertising of course is the size of the gap it can create between image and reality.
So for me Platform plays to all of these routes – and brand platform is simply the dominant communications and engagement framework.
Sponsorship, of course, is premised on engaging with consumers. And 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 a ready-made solution, in principle. The challenge is: can the platform be as coherent as Jack Daniel’s, as visually compelling as Guinness and as relevant as The Body Shop.
And this is where the discussion goes, 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.