Category Archives: Red Thread

The Red Thread is our newsletter, emailed 6 times a year. It gives us the space to focus on 2 key thought-pieces; to explore important and timely events and issues, to approach them in the Redmandarin way, and communicate that to you via your inbox.

We also take a look at a sponsorship or partnership that has impressed us – one which we think has merit and opportunity and allows us to offer credit where due.

You can view articles from previous issues below, or to subscribe click here.

Red Thread

In search of community

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Community as a marketing term really started buzzing back in the 90s.

It was .com days, the world was alight with online content propositions and ‘building community’ was all anyone had to do. Building community was a great phrase for that era, because it had an optimistic ring and easy promise which ‘building a customer-base’ just couldn’t match. Unfortunately, all too often, website traffic and an online community became a substitute for actually making any money.

It never went away of course, gradually rewriting for itself an unspoken definition of an audience somewhere between ‘aware’ and ‘considering’ – all shades of warm. Likes, in other words, clustering around around the role of the brand as an experiential meeting place: how was the product for you?

Community’s recent resurgence into the world of marketing, on the other hand, wears a different face.

Community, since 2008, simply means the public. Generally speaking, it’s the same people of course, just described from a different relational perspective. The public is no longer one big audience to be aggregated but instead the fabric of society which makes business possible, and community this time around carries with it a clear sense of social responsibility.

Most corporate websites now talk about community.  Classic CR use relates to the communities around operational bases, where the business is rooted in employees and, in these days, suppliers. For brands with a definable audience, such as Nickelodeon, or  McDonald’s even, it’s relatively easy to identify representative groups of that community: no matter what  you think of Ronald, he ticks the community box.

But how does a retail or an online brand define community? How to demonstrate a meaningful commitment  to community when your customer base spans many economic and geographic segments?

Like many totem words, community layers like an onion. It has a slightly retro feel, and overtones of collegiate responsibility. Community can also – easily – message social disadvantage, poverty. Community shops flourish where no profit-minded retailer would tread. Community groups all too easily represent support for the unsupported. Despite a slightly socialist ring, it’s a preferable alternative to the rabble-rousing ‘people’ – and sounds more definable than ‘public’…  And that’s the trouble: in the world of shmarketing, it’s a power-word: it sounds targeted but actually means anyone and everyone.

From a sponsorship POV, the challenge is of course to define and then sell in an approach to community, because the broad church of community has to translate into a channel. A media channel, an organisation, an interest group – because targeting everyone with the current premise of community is a fatally flawed concept.

Take Pepsi. Pepsi’s much-feted, ill-fated Refresh Project was the epitome of targeting everyone. It proudly and loudly stood out the 2010 round of Super Bowl advertising in support of its community commitment. Refresh offered US$20 million of corporate largesse across the original criteria of Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, the Planet, Neighbourhoods and Education – just about everything. It had a very simple application process – for everybody. It successfully garnered 61 million online votes in the course of its two year life. But Refresh was a social media experiment pretending to be a brand play: sorry, ‘a long term equity play’, in Pepsi’s own words. The programme design was flawed from the outset, but its biggest failing as a brand play is that it targeted… everyone, every single community it could. Even US$20 million spreads very thinly across the entire US of A.

NatWest’s Cricket Force, by comparison, feels small. The programme, which encourages its staff to volunteer to refurbish cricket clubs up and down the UK, is hardly at the cutting edge of social impact. It doesn’t aspire to change the Planet, or help Health, or offer Food and Shelter, like Pepsi did: it just makes cricket clubs look nicer. But in every dimension bar one, it’s smarter. It’s perversely on brand. It supports NatWest’s longstanding association with cricket. It hits NatWest’s customer heartlands. It’s easy, inexpensive and, hey, it’s sustainable. It’s targeted, in other words: the basic stuff of sponsorship, nay marketing. It only loses in one point of comparison: it isn’t headline material, but we can forgive that.

And once again, we have to hail Red Bull for showing the full potential of building a community around a proposition which is almost as narrow in content – action sports, but universal in relevance: freedom, rebellion, expression. The whole freesports promise.

The word community has become a crutch, a catch-all term and a substitute for actually defining and understanding audiences. Communities aren’t made up of everybody, they define themselves based on who is in and just as importantly who is out. There are millions of communities – they exist in geographies and they exist online, they’re built around shared passions and shared loathings, they can emerge spontaneously or be built and sustained over millennia. They ebb and flow, gain new members and lose old ones, but they never encompass everyone.

Identifying, defining, and working with a community should be used as the basis for great and impactful sponsorship campaigns, it’s the foundation of sponsorship at its very best. But you have to make sure the word community actually means something – because if your community is meant to include everyone, then you don’t have a community at all.

Red Thread

Sponsorship Storytelling

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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 put him on the straight and narrow, I resist: the figure of Father Christmas is so compelling.

The term ‘figure’ actually has a special meaning in psychology and psychotherapy, which is relevant to both sponsorship – and storytelling. A clumsy segue into sponsorship storytelling? Yes and no.

Two Faces form the image of a Candlestick

A Butcher and a Baker

Gestalt psychology, articulated by Kurt Goldstein, established simple truths, laws and principles about perception. Gestalt psychology maintains that the human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts. The Gestalt effect is the capability of our senses to create coherent patterns from disparate visual cues, as exemplified by the quite famous images displayed here. In other words, the mind has an innate tendency to make sense of what it perceives, and this tendency leads us to fill in the gaps in what we see, hear, and know – to make educated guesses, to establish predictive and interpretive patterns.


Black or White dot grid optical illusion

Gestalt psychotherapy was developed by Fritz and Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s. Besides other things, it borrowed these concepts from Goldstein and extended their application to behaviour: when we become aware of being thirsty (identify the figure), we drink, closing the figure. If we become aware of loneliness, we quieten it with company. The concept of ‘closure’, as popularised in American movies of the 80s, is perhaps Gestalt’s most annoying cultural legacy.


Dalmatian camouflaged against background

But the thought that our innate tendency is to create patterns and meaning from life’s disparate events, or brand touchpoints, applies to sponsorship as much as to anything else – and at many levels. At the macro, it might relate to the importance of creating a clearly defined relationship between brand and property, its purpose – to which self-promotion is not a satisfactory answer to the questions of why, why this, why like this?

The point is, it’s not only natural to want to understand what a sponsorship is about, it’s part of our programming. If we’re not given a figure, we’ll do one of a number of things: we’ll come up with our own – which might or might not align with brand messaging intentions; we’ll dismiss it – at some level, because it doesn’t make sense; or it will become a subconscious irritant. Each of these responses effectively reduces the emotional impact of the sponsorship.


The figure of the relationship between npower and football is ill-defined and unclear. npower’s sponsorship of the Championship, for example, never began to explain: why football, why the Championship for npower? Likewise Aon’s relationship with Manchester United.

On the other hand, Castrol’s performance index was a clear attempt to create and call out a relationship.

Investec is a great example of a sponsor which defines a clear relationship between itself and what it sponsors. Beginning with the Investec Challenge, it moved on to Investec Derby Festival and latterly the Investec Ashes. At the micro level, its activations also have a clearly definable shape: the Investec Derby Day.

Figure also applies to sponsorship narrative: the beginning, middle, end of simple storytelling wisdom.

It’s all too easy to think of sponsorship as an exercise which begins with a contract and ends with an exit, that we can forget to consider how it looks from the outside. Sponsorship is the story of a relationship, a relationship between sponsor and property, or whatever names we choose to give these two characters.

From the perspective of the storyteller, the sponsorship narrative needs to explain how – and why – the relationship came to be, what brought these two characters together, what was the attraction, or the driver, and what were the consequences – what emerges from the partnership, and how it all ends. Building on the storytelling practice, one would say: a compelling beginning, a point of tension and a resolution.

Although we, as sponsorship practitioners, are rarely responsible for brand, we’re frequently given the freedom to establish partnerships which give us huge brand accountability. And, as architects of the sponsorship narrative, we can ensure or neglect to ensure that the brand has a clear role and that it is allowed to express its character through its relationship.

If you try to tell your sponsorship as a story, you’ll spot very quickly whether it’s a showbiz wedding, or something deeper. Storytelling is a useful exercise, a model to stretch your brand and sponsorship thinking.

Is this over-complicating something which should be kept simple? We don’t believe so. The levels of engagement achieved by Games sponsors hinges on a sponsorship story with a large, glorious finale, an entirely different narrative model from most other sponsorships.

Why shouldn’t a technology company enter into a football partnership with the goal of helping the club transform its digital comms? bring in support from the wider agency world to coach and mentor the team? help supply and fund any tech restructure? Why shouldn’t it exit with job done? As a fan, your appreciation is going to be both clearer and sharper, you’re going to receive a direct business message, you’re going to be in a mood to celebrate the achievement of a three year programme rather than cry dependently at the loss of a sponsor.

Why shouldn’t an airline partner do the same with regard to international expansion, the community programmes which all top league clubs are doing to build their global franchise? Why shouldn’t a beer sponsor actively link itself to fanbase development? Why shouldn’t sponsorship plan its exit from the word go, turning exit into a celebration rather than ignominious and often embarrassed departure?

The figure of Father Christmas is so compelling because he comes with his own closed loop of a story. Justice, fairness, care and love are all wrapped up in his own Christmas narrative. Why do we give presents at Christmas? Father Christmas is the easy answer.

Season’s Greetings

This is an extract from a fuller presentation ‘Sponsorship and storytelling’ presented at Sponsor Tribune, in Amsterdam on 29 November.

Red Thread

Sponsorship as organisational change-driver

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For Redmandarin, a full 90% of client briefs relate to deepening brand engagement. This might be expressed as re-positioning  shift of audience focus, reappraisal, building NPS or advocacy, but, ultimately, it comes down to people feeling warmer about the brand.

But there’s another objective which surfaces much more rarely – organisational change.

And sponsorship’s potential is enormous.

We came across some great examples in our research for Working the Olympics.

Visa and Samsung are the textbook studies for Olympic brand transformation, but a less well known example, is AMP, in Sydney 2000. AMP is an Australia-based financial services company, formerly the Australian Mutual Provident Society, which was a non-profit life insurance company. In 1998, it was demutualised and listed on both the Australian and New Zealand stock exchanges.

American CEO George Trumbull had been employed to manage the listing and drive it hard. In his words: ‘I took Olympic partnership to be a deliberate, all-encompassing transformation tool that would reduce the time I would need … from 10 years down to 5.’ And he used the Sydney Games very successfully to drive the internal cultural transformation from an older style, older world business to a very contemporary, sharp, highly-focused, customer-centric model.

VW China, similarly, used Beijing 2008 to drive dramatic internal culture change. VW China began as a joint venture with the Chinese government, which saw its market share drop from 50% to 15% as it emerged from the aegis of government protection into a new commercial landscape – with the liberalisation of the Chinese market.

So VW China used the Olympics as a tool to rally the organisation, 40,000 people, to a new level of competitiveness – in what they actually called the Olympic restructure programme, embedding Olympic terms, thinking and targets across the entire business to increase responsiveness, flexibility, customer-centricity and raise performance levels. Again, with great success.

Redmandarin’s main experiences of sponsorship as a lever for OD were with UBS, and Philips Electronics. UBS explicitly used their sponsorship of Ernesto Bertarelli’s entry into the 2003 America’s Cup, Team Alinghi, to cement their global brand. Their sponsorship, which ended in the victory of Team Alinghi, was notably successful in leveraging relationship-building opportunities across the various divisions – and grouping employees around a single, global objective.

We helped Philips use the FIFA World Cup to accelerate their ‘one Philips’ philosophy as an operational reality across their  (then) five business divisions, even bartering rights with Toshiba to ensure every Philips division had skin in the game (semiconductors, actually).

Tail and dog? It feels almost hubristic to suggest sponsorship could be considered as organisational change-driver… why can’t it just stay in its box?

David Aaker, when we interviewed him in 2009 for our first publication, Defining Sponsorship, correctly identified one benefit of sponsorship as ‘spanning organisational silos’ and this particular dimension of sponsorship certainly supports organisational change – but David’s point (which was not specifically addressing questions of OD) overlooks some powerful intrinsics of sponsorship.

What enables sponsorship to reach target audiences so well is its ability to sidestep emotional resistance – conscious and unconscious . It’s a psychological truth that people, we I should say, don’t like to feel unseen, unheard, or unvalued, which, I remember one of my teachers once telling me, is the single greatest cause of anger on the planet. When we’re objectified (be it as consumers, voters, readers, shoppers, subjects or employees), we resist: in fact, we’re endlessly creative in our resistance. We look for ways to subvert systems and ‘policies’. We switch off and zone out. We kick. Or play dead.

But sponsorship has the ability to sidle up to people gently, engage them in conversation, and creative an affective relationship – without provoking resistance. From that perspective, it’s the ultimate route to reach the hard-to-reach – and that can include employees.

Much of current attention on resistance to organisational change focusses on affective, that is, emotional processes, recognising that we as human beings have the tendency to populate areas of unknowing with the products of our own imagination: ignorance is fear, in other words. And what sponsorship can do is engage with and validate employees’ emotions through a clear demonstration of corporate empathy: we understand you. Instead of asking employees to adopt corporate values, it makes the clear statement: we share yours.

What Alinghi, interestingly, had in common with the Olympics was a clear sense of shared and public purpose – and adventure: for Alinghi, the sense of purpose was almost crusading – to bring the America’s Cup to Switzerland. For those who have lived it, this feels very reminiscent of start-up energy, a time of ambition, when everything is possible, regardless of the odds, with a unifying, motivational sense of organisational purpose that can be buried beneath layers of operational procedure.

David Aaker was entirely right of course to highlight  sponsorship’s ability to span silos, cross-functions and create fresh conversations.  And when these conversations are around, for example, the sort of innovation required to grapple with an out-of-corporate-body experience – such as the Olympics, it’s easy to see how this can be used to support change.

Relationships, both internal and external, become fixed, just like neural pathways – with the danger that one’s universe becomes very limited. Organisationally, businesses naturally like to operationalise – to harness extensive workforces. But the danger is that your relationships, your business model and your thinking become fixed – and your systems become as much of a limitation as a support.

Intelligently crafted, sponsorship offers an opportunity to reconfigure your system.

Red Thread

‘Make GE Olympic-centric’

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The text below is an extract from an interview with Professor James Santomier of the John F. Welch College of Business, at Sacred Heart University, Connecticut. James and his colleague Tim Crader were discussing Tim’s professional experience at GE one day and he off-handedly mentioned ‘pull-through’ marketing, and implied that GE had benefited significantly from its IOC relationship, which stimulated further discussion and research.

Beth Comstock, who is the CMO, co-authored an article for the Harvard Business Review, published in late 2010, which focused on the fact that up until 10 years ago, to all intents and purposes, GE didn’t have a marketing programme – it had simply been so confident in its technologies. But one very evocative paragraph near the beginning paints a picture of growing realisation: ‘GE was learning that it could not win simply by launching increasingly sophisticated technologies… Some of its best thought-out new offerings were fast becoming commodities.’

So in 2003, GE began to evolve its marketing function, doubling the size of the function, and marketing became ‘the torchbearer’ for what was internally called ‘Commercial Innovation’ – which included ‘Imagination Breakthroughs’ across many categories. And essentially, Dan Henson and Beth Comstock were the driving forces behind the softening of GE, the femininising of GE if you will, and making it a much more user-friendly organisation. And the sponsorship played into that.

Around the same time, NBC, the media business unit of GE, was bidding for the media rights to the Games in 2010 and 2012, and GE’s top management made a strategic decision to seek a TOP position with the IOC. NBC’s winning bid represented a 33% premium on their payments for 2006 and 2008 and then, in addition, GE paid approximately US$180 million to join the TOP programme.

The drivers of the IOC relationship were most likely Dan Henson and Jeffrey Immelt. Beth was more focused on communication, and wasn’t CMO at the time. And I think, if Peter Foss hadn’t been a friend of Immelt’s, and hadn’t had experience in sponsorship, they may not have done the deal. Beth Comstock told me: ‘at the time we took the Olympics we really were trying to push from a commercial – a sales and marketing perspective – cross-selling … The Olympics allowed us to focus on this … in a very powerful way, that made it real.’

When Jeffrey Immelt convinced Peter Foss to take on the job, Peter pushed to flatten the organisation and to make GE Olympic-centric. And it’s my guess that because GE was so fresh to marketing, there was little by way of restrictions in terms of how they could integrate the sponsorship – whereas for other major companies, their marketing processes would be too institutionalised and rigid.

The GE WorkOut is a proprietary OD tool developed back in 1988, after CEO Jack Welch emerged from a meeting with mid-level managers in which many expressed concern that, amongst other things, process was slowing down important decisions. The WorkOut brings together a cross-functional group of people together to develop actionable recommendations to a business challenge that has been identified as a priority. These are tied to action plans which, if approved by leadership, are implemented within 90 days.

So when Peter Foss was hired, he developed a WorkOut related to the Olympics. His vision was a new, very flat, and non-bureaucratic organisation with a single point of contact for each of GE’s business units. That individual would be responsible for driving the revenue for his or her respective business and have a matrixed relationship with other profit /loss and internal GE cost centres. And now that’s exactly the way they’re selling all their infrastructure, and clean energy, and new grid technology.

Dan Henson, the former CMO, went on record to say that GE has ‘always been good at selling in the context of the P&L, but the Olympics forced us to be adept at responding to opportunities that span three, four or five business units … to present one GE face to the customer’.

The most interesting aspect was how the organisation embraced the sponsorship and how they were willing to adapt the organisation in response. For most organisations, sponsorship is an appendage. Beth told us in our meeting that the sponsorship became a learning experience for them.

Red Thread

Spinning the TOPs

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The IOC’s TOP programme is clearly in rude good health.

With seven out of 11 partners confirmed until 2020, the IOC can congratulate itself on having established itself clearly as the premier global property. The presence of businesses such as GE, P&G and Dow Chemical in the TOP programme further testifies to a value which extends way beyond the traditional appeal of sponsorship – and relegates both the FIFA World Cup and F1 to a new second tier.

On the surface therefore, the IOC’s announcement that TOP is up for review appears surprising – the most successful sponsorship programme of all time, it’s US$1 billion short of being broken, so what’s to fix? But in the coded, diplomatic language of the IOC, ‘up for review’ of course begs interpretation. Whilst the review process will be characteristically thorough – nobody will be expecting radical change.

If I were in Timo’s position, I’m not seriously going to worry about pricing. Although the rights fees for individual Games have been on an upwards trajectory for the last decade, this has been heavily skewed by recent visits to the dominant emerging markets of China, Russia and Brazil. A TOP partnership might seem under-priced at a starting point of US$100 million per quadrennium, but with that comes a minimum eight year commitment, an obligation to activate, however modestly, the Summer, Winter and Youth Games. A total financial investment of over US$200 million – but an even more significant organisational commitment. The issue is not about TOPs paying too little, it’s about revenue expectations of domestic partners becoming unrealistically, unsustainably high (and that can only be addressed through the bid process).

But I am certainly going to look at category re-definition – and creep, because the current situation is squandering commercial opportunities for both the IOC and its OCOGs.

It’s a complex knot to unpick. Partners derive value from their category rights in three ways: they build communications, engagement and promotional platforms on them; they sell products and services off them; and they protect themselves with them. The IOC’s challenge is to reframe the value of each, and in particular to qualify and manage that protection.

Sainsbury’s illustrates the problem. By all accounts, including sotto voce commentary from LOCOG, less so sotto from Igor Stolyarov, the Commercial Director of Sochi 2014, and very evasive commentary from Coca-Cola, Coke has no contractual right to block the supermarket category – and yet it happens, time after time. TOP partners ring-fence their position ever more securely – through amendments to their partnership agreement with each renewal, through their deep relationships with the IOC. Coca-Cola can justifiably exclude Pepsi – and Guaraná Antarctica in Brazil as a direct competitor to Coca-Cola – but all local water, juice, tea and coffee brands? The same question could equally be asked of GE, McDonalds, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung and Visa

Category conversations tend to focus on convergence, but it’s a red herring: for the purpose of sponsorship categories, the iPad’s a computer and the iPhone’s a handset, a smart TV’s a TV and a smartphone is still a handset. In a strange way, Panasonic and Samsung are actually the model. They’re direct competitors in many categories. Both manufacture handsets and TVs. Both are restricted in the activation of their Olympic association to their respective categories. And both brands benefit or stand to benefit equally from the Olympic halo. When the principle becomes the practice, Samsung leaves Panasonic in the blocks, of course, because while Samsung sweat the assets, Panasonic posts generic advertising with washed-out colours that would sell sepia back-catalogues way better than HD TV. But the point stands: there’s enough space beneath the Olympic umbrella for competing brands to co-exist.

For B2C brands hoping to break back their investment via consumer sales, more categories in theory represent greater opportunity – but frankly, it’s difficult to imagine that scale of incremental sales for Acer, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Panasonic or Samsung. Perhaps, globally, there’s a case to be made – but here sales are actually less dependent on category numbers and more so on when the OCOG finalises its ticketing arrangements. Tickets, not the marques, are the biggest driver of promotional sales and London 2012’s (comparatively) late release of ticketing will have hit partners’ sales far more than a pruning and rationalisation of the categories.

The role of the IOC commercial team has historically been sales-focussed. Without losing sight of the paramount need to embrace its partners and build deep, long-term relationships, the IOC is clearly looking to take back a little control. It’s in a strong enough position to do that – and it’s given itself enough time to do it as gently as possible.

If I were in Timo’s position, I’d be using the review to develop some ideas which are altogether more radical. What if the IOC were to request, for example, that each TOP invest an additional US$25 million into IOTF, the International Olympic Truce Foundation. This additional investment will strengthen the Olympic brand – and the value of their own Olympic association – by allowing it to engage directly with grassroots peace-builders in bringing peace through sport; IOTF offers brands the possibility of a four year citizenship narrative which exists independently of (but altogether aligned with) the Games; and such a collaboration, of some of the world’s most iconic brands, is in itself is a model for the future. And why not?

 

Red Thread

8 throwaway lines for use over the next three weeks

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1 No logo is the secret

UEFA Champions League and FIFA World Cup make great play about limiting partner numbers to reduce clutter and deliver greater value. The Olympic model sidesteps branding clutter by …not offering branding. The lack of media exposure forces Partners to consider more carefully how they create value. Result: 7 of the 11 IOC’s TOP partners are signed up to 2020.

2 Think B2B, not B2C

B2B sponsorship is easier and usually more cost-effective for two simple reasons: business audiences are directly targetable; and revenue potential per customer is greater. B2C brands by contrast generally over-stretch themselves to achieve reach – and ultimately lose relevance. GE billed US$750m in Beijing.

3 By the time the Games arrive, the game’s up

The opportunity for partners is to play a visible and commercial role in the build-up to the Games. Providing the Partner carves out a clear and credible role, its Games status gives it a relevance most brands usually lack. Conversations are easier: when else did EDF’s fleet procurement make national press?

4 The Olympic brand is in a class of its own.

2700 years of heritage, global awareness over 90%, clear association with values like hope, humanity and diversity, the sense of universal myth and symbolism that attaches to the Olympic flame – the Olympic brand offers the best platform there is. From Dow Chemicals through Coca-Cola is quite some brand stretch.

5 Local? Watch out.

First time Partners simply cannot begin to imagine the scale of the challenge they face. Even if they begin by thinking they can isolate the association from the rest of the business, the Games are simply too big to ignore, and create an unprecedented challenge. Helen Nugent, on the Board at Macquarie: ‘My biggest personal career challenge’

6 Think: ideal client

Think of it this way: the Games offer the opportunity to write your ideal case study. You’ve got the world’s best known client – and, to a large extent, you write your own brief. Deloitte’s Heather Hancock: ‘It’s the story we tell our clients.’

7 It’s not a promotion.

Partnership can transform businesses, but if you consider it a promotional investment, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. That’s an awful lot of Curly Wurlys.

8 It’s a change driver

The most successful partnership are used to accelerate organisational change: changing culture post-demutualisation (AMP in Sydney), emerging from the aegis of state protection (VW China), globalising the brand (Visa and Samsung); repositioning (Cisco); facilitating the restructuring of the sales function (GE).

Red Thread

we love story-telling

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Brand storytelling is back – bigger than ever.

First time around for me was Tom Peters, the original business guru. His pitch was about corporate myth-making: the conscious creation of those symbolic stories which so effortlessly epitomise an attitude or a principle: Lou Gerstner forcing the IBM Board to abandon the PowerPoint in favour of the conversation, for example. Tom’s now making the point that the brand story is more important than the brand.

His punchy point is that stories are simply great carriers of information. Because stories provide a vehicle for both facts and meaning – an engaging, long-hand mnemonic in which to embed values, facts, personality. Tom’s not alone now. David Aaker’s there, Jim Collins, Philip Kotler, Kevin Roberts all blog the story. And many brand agencies explicitly position themselves as working on turning the brand into the story: the iconic founder’s story is a popular variation.

For businesses with a lived sense of history, brand storytelling is a given: brand heavyweights such as IBM, BMW, J&J and GE; welterweights like Virgin, The Body Shop, Burberry, Jack Daniels; and young bantams such as Innocent, EasyJet and, well, Thomas Crapper message from a continuum of brand story. Paul Polman has updated Unilever’s brand story with a fresh relevance – because brands aren’t about abstract values, they’re about values in action – stories in other words.

Brands’ ability to story-tell hinges on many variables: intrinsic business belief in the value of brand, clearly; but also the strength of heritage, and the prevailing imprint of the founder, the nature of the business journey and purpose, especially the drama of early years’ experience, the retained corporate sense of individuality (in a commoditised world) – all of these as diluted by acquisition, brand stretch, product nature, age and size, And many businesses – especially large ones – have forgotten, or lost the ability to tell their story.

For these brands in particular, what Games partnership offers is the opportunity to write their own story. An intrinsic attribute of the Games product is the fact that they start with an inspiring vision – and end with a global celebration. To a greater extent than any other major property, each Partner plays a part in making that happen. For consumer-facing brands like adidas, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, the Games are not so defining. But for predominantly B2B brands, Games’ involvement both dramatises and humanises the corporate mission.

In the words of Ron Rogowski, from UPS: ‘It’s about how you take your company story, and weave it into the Olympic story. Our story and brand platform – ‘We Love Logistics’ – is a big concept. We’ve got to bring that concept to life – what we actually do for our customers, using the London 2012 Games as a case study.’


It’s much more than a case study of course. It’s (potentially) the perfect case study – a project of national and even global relevance, with an absolute delivery deadline, and the opportunity to elect and define the scope of your own business contribution.

Deloitte’s Heather Hancock is very clear about the value of the Games story: ’LOCOG chose us because of our tools and capabilities around major programmes, complex cross-border tax regimes, organisational design, business continuity and operational readiness, testing and war-gaming – a real breadth and depth of business services. That’s the story we tell our clients. It brings alive our impact in a way that data about our staff numbers and service lines fails to do.’ Internally and externally.

Things can go wrong: IBM’s dramatic meltdown in 1992 is the apocryphal scare story, when, as the (unauthorised) story goes, 83 year old weightlifters were clean-lifting weights of over 400 kilos (or some such). But in general, partners look forward to association with a runaway success – any glitches lost in the general halo of Games delivery.

Atos uses storytelling more traditionally, with behind the scenes pre and in Games hospitality, a glowing highlight in pitch documents, but UPS advertising has taken its London 2012 story public, editorialising the herculean feat of moving and warehousing 30 million pieces of London 2012 kit in print and video.

Steven Keith, of Petro-Canada (now Suncor Energy) says it his own way: ‘The ’88 Torch Relay was a defining moment for Petro-Canada. So when you ask people about the brand, most Canadians recognise it, know we’re oil and gas – and 50 – 60% of them know that we have a connection to the Olympic Games.’ It’s become a big part of their story.

Red Thread

The Paralympics come of age

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The IOC’s signature on the landmark agreement with the IPC in Sydney 2001, linking the hosting of the Paralympic Games and the Olympics, was both hugely generous and characteristically far-sighted.

In exchange for abnegating their sponsorship rights and accepting a flat capped contribution from each Games, the IPC gained the guarantee of association with the world’s most powerful sports brand. Back in 2000, the agreement looked particularly generous. From the perspective of 2012, it looks particularly far-sighted.

In the mind of Xavier Gonzalez, CEO of the IPC, Beijing marked the coming of age of the Paralympian: ‘It was really in Beijing, to my mind, that Paralympians started to be proud to be Paralympians, and didn’t need to say ‘I’m an Olympian’’. And Sochi perhaps marks the coming of age of the IPC as a force for social change: ‘The changes in legislation to make Sochi as accessible as possible will create a template for the rest of Russia. Not that this is unique to Sochi. The Paralympic Games aren’t an end in themselves – they’re the beginning of the opportunity.’

But could London 2012 mark its coming of age commercially?  London 2012, with the obvious good graces of LOCOG, has seen a number of interesting developments.

The separation of broadcasting rights between BBC and C4 gave the Paralympics a broadcast partner who would be determined to keen to tell their story as powerfully as possible. More importantly, it created a commercial platform for the Paralympic Games which was not open to the Olympics in the UK, supporting the recruitment of Paralympic partners.

From a partnership perspective, the London Paralympic Games also offers powerful precedents for successor OCOGs. While Coke’s continued success in blocking the supermarket category cost LOCOG nearly £40 million, it opened a loophole of happiness which other OCOGs will be keen to copy. As Igor Stolyarov, himself an ex-Coker comments ‘London did brilliantly by acquiring Sainsbury’s as a Paralympic sponsor, a very smart move. The Sainsbury’s deal creates a real precedent.’

The agreement between the IOC and the IPC, extended this May until 2020 effectively incentivises the OCOG to be as commercially creative as possible around the Paralympics – as any funds raised for the Paralympics go directly to the OCOG, not the IPC. On this basis, we would expect future OCOGs to be attentive to the nimble contractual footwork of London 2012 – and use the Paralympic Games as a route to dodge Coke’s TOP firepower.

Sainsbury’s clever procurement clearly saved them roughly the same amount, enabling them to invest seriously in their Active Kids programme. Active Kids has been phenomenally successful, gives Sainsbury’s the right to claim to be the dominant brand playing in school sport – having channelled the equivalent of £115 million of sports equipment into schools since 2005. But like any 7 year old affinity programme, it needs constant reinvention to regain front of mind with consumers, and this was one of the strongest drivers for a 2012 partnership back in 2007, when Sainsbury’s was a Redmandarin client.

Sainsbury’s of course aren’t disclosing their activation budget, but with a platform which includes an ambition to introduce one million schoolchildren to Paralympic sport, David Beckham on film, a respectable C4 partnership – and a £10 million commitment to the UK School Games for the next four years, they’re not saving the change – and demonstrating a commitment to community which is both broader and deeper than any other London 2012 partner.

Weighting sponsorship investment towards activation, not rights is a sensible but still unusual position. In this case, Sainsbury’s judged – correctly in our opinion – that most people wouldn’t differentiate between association with the Olympic and Paralympic Games; and if they did, the differentiation would be positive. Sainsbury’s partnership campaign, which surely deserves any sponsorship award it’s entered for, will be a case study for the textbooks.

Curiously, Wolff Olins must also take some credit. The differences between the logos for the Olympic and Paralympic Games are minimal. The colourways obviously diverge, but no more than many Tier 1 Partners who pay for that very privilege. For anyone not versed in Olympic iconography and the ranking implications of a full colour Partner logo – Sainsbury’s is just another sponsor.

Anecdotally, the Paralympics isn’t working so well in London so far as client hospitality is concerned. Although spectators at the Beijing Games were effusive and enthusiastic, there is clearly a lingering perception that the Paralympic Games lack Olympic magic for business clients. Conversely, with respect to employee engagement, engagement with the Paralympics appears to be hugely powerful. In this instance, employee engagement is probably a more reliable indicator of consumer opinion: Sainsbury’s clearly think so.

The IPC’s active role echoes that of the IOC: to oversee the organisation of the Paralympic Games (as well as serving as the International Federation for nine sports). Its symbolic role however is arguably broader than that of the IOC – to represent the rights of athletes with disabilities, and by extension, all people with disabilities. The enormous relevance of the Paralympic metaphor lies of course in the struggle we each share to overcome our limitations. For Allianz, the power of this metaphor, and their ability to integrate it into messaging, more than compensates for having to take a back seat at the Games. In the words of Joseph Gross: ‘I am 100% convinced the IPC has a very positive future. I don’t expect it to be a fast-burner, but each Games, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio, is going to advance the profile and the impact of the IPC. Managed well, I believe its relevance extends far beyond the disability community. It connects hugely with social values.’

In ‘Working the Olympics’, Xavier likened the IPC to the IOC’s younger brother: ‘You have one son who is already established, and you have the little one who is growing and wants to do things’. We’re led to understand that, with the encouragement of LOCOG, TOP partners will for the first time (unbelievably) maintain their presence throughout the Paralympics. Redmandarin believes the Paralympics are coming of age.

NB We’re assuming Coca-Cola will do some buddying up to the IPC and consider its relationship with the Paralympic Games going forward.

LOCOG’s sponsorship mistake

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The Greenwash Gold campaign, which seized on Dow Jones and lumped together BP and Rio Tinto to create a rogue’s gallery of London 2012, signally failed to attract consumer support.

While LOCOG played the British card of staunch support extremely well, and the campaign has left barely a reputational scuff, one element though, Redmandarin would criticise: the bolt-on of Sustainability Partnership.

BMW, BP, BT, Cisco, EDF and GE all signed on the dotted line for the additional title – which arguably shows that, as a sales technique, it’s worked. But as a practice, it raises large questions. Partner categories and designations are the standard fare of the sponsorship package – but the title of Sustainability Partner is not a self-descriptor, it’s bestowed by LOCOG. And as much as LOCOG deny it in strictly legal terms, the word commonly used to describe this relationship is endorsement.

Offering this (let’s say) quasi-endorsement places LOCOG in the moral position of accepting responsibility for the creation and satisfaction of criteria which justify the title. Now we’ve no doubt that the PR machines of BP, BT, EDF and LOCOG can easily align behind clear sustainability messaging and proof-points. But it’s a mistake on three counts.

Count one: sustainability is fundamentally about integrated practice. It’s philosophically at odds with sustainability to designate specific partners. Okay, no big deal – but the action of selling a sustainability position to some partners both undermines the remaining partners’ ability to demonstrate sustainability – and in itself clearly creates a lightning rod for green campaigners, placing both OCOG and IOC in a defensive comms position.

Count two, it was unnecessary. The end and means argument of sales expedience hinges on whether it clinched the deals. But we know for a fact that it didn’t pull in GE, Cisco or BMW. BT slugged it out for the partner position with Orange – the title here wasn’t a driver. Certainly not BP, which was always destined to stump up as a solid British citizen and has a sophisticated understanding of sustainability communications (if not PR crisis management). For EDF, who knows, but the point is already won.

It’s not necessary because one critical benefit of Games partnership is that of partners being able to tell the story, as it unfolds, of the contribution they’re making to the staging of a successful event: sustainability stories and credit can only be created by actual sustainability activity.

Count three, it legitimises greenwashing. The notable elephant in the Park of London 2012 is EDF’s status as a major provider of nuclear energy in Europe. EDF has run a five year campaign to position itself as a friend of the environment – without publicly (to our knowledge) referencing the fact that 61.8% of EDF energy is nuclear generated – with its  own corporate commitment to renewable energy ranking in the bottom half of the UK’s major energy suppliers. EDF’s own Olympic journey has been greeted with cynicism and dismay at many stages by the green movement – the reaction possibly aggravated by the paid for position of Sustainability Partner.

There’s an argument, which prevails in some countries, that nuclear power is eminently sustainable – but this argument is not about the merits of nuclear power, it’s about sponsorship strategy and communications integrity. Redmandarin has found no evidence of EDF trying to advance the nuclear argument within its Olympic programme.

It claims to have introduced sustainability support materials to 5,000,000 schoolchildren across the UK: Redmandarin hasn’t  been able to study these (at the time of publication), but the page on ‘Nuclear power and a safer, cleaner world’ isn’t visible on the contents page. And I wonder how parents would feel about that?

This is LOCOG’s mistake. They sold the title of Sustainability Partner to, amongst others, a business which has at best mismanaged its 2012 campaign (because there was a better way) and at worst consistently abused the title throughout its consumer communications. It could have been worse, but it really wasn’t necessary in the first place.

It doesn’t help London 2012 and it certainly doesn’t help sponsorship.

* EDF has conducted a radical cleanse of its Team Green Britain Day Facebook page in the run up to 2012 – so the evidence of this is no longer visible.

Red Thread

Olympics: what next?

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One of the defining attributes of the Games is their life-cycle. The simple fact that each version of the Games only takes place once every four years, in different parts of the world, ensures the experience remains eternally fresh, not stuck in the comfortable but deadening rut of annual fixture.

Each Games spans seven long years, building from Host City announcement through to global celebration, and the Games are as much about this journey – as the event itself, with an unprecedented network of businesses and organisations working towards a single end.

And then Continue reading →