According to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Games offer brands the most powerful and valuable marketing platform imaginable.

It’s a tough one to argue against. After all, the Games have developed enormous worldwide media reach and their uniquely positive set of brand values mean that they’re a fit with the aspirations of more or less every commercial brand you care to mention.

Scour the internet for the various lists of the world’s strongest brands: many of them have hitched their wagons to the Olympic Games at one time or another. Continue reading →

First published in SportBusiness Magazine December 2011

As SportBusiness International this month identifies and celebrates the 20 men and women whose innovation have shaped the sports industry in 2011, I want to recognise one of the most influential and yet least talked about names in world sport.

Professor Arne Ljungqvistt’s past lives as a champion high-jumper, doctor, and professor of pathology have made him one of the world’s foremost experts on performance-enhancing drugs, and the tests to detect them.
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First published in SportBusiness Magazine November 2011

Malcolm Gladwell’s written a number of articles for grantland.com on the current state of the NBA during the four-months and counting of the current lockout. He eloquently argues the case that not only are NBA owners overstating their claims for financial penury but through their actions they grossly overvalue their own sports franchises relative to any financial return they could hope to achieve.

There’s now a growing consensus that games will be missed and that the players are going to end up on the losing side of a substantial change in salaries and contract length. Were this not such a predictable re-tread of 1998 it would be surprising that a league with so much reliance on the image of its players has the whip hand in negotiations
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First published in SportBusiness Magazine October 2011

The increasing importance of emerging markets has highlighted the complexities of sponsorship investment in key developing economies. As growth and marketing budgets stagnate in developed economies, major brands have switched focus to the developing economies and sponsorship budgets are starting to follow suit.

India is the most interesting case in point; there’s a confluence between corruption issues in Indian governance and a narrow range of available sports properties which has made India a challenging market for building differentiated sponsorship programmes.
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When Manchester City FC announced their £400m deal with Etihad Airways, cynics were quick to point out it seemed a clever way to increase the club’s income via a related Abu Dhabi business, ensuring MCFC’s defecit stayed the right side of the UEFA fair play regulations. Arsene Wenger and Ian Ayre quickly called foul and, along with others, questioned whether the process had been credible, fair, and whether the deal reflected market value.

Truth is this won’t have been taken to market in any meaningful sense, but MCFC aren’t a government entity and so have no obligation to do so. If they got an unsolicited offer significantly above the value they had assigned to those rights they would be entitled to take the offer. If that offer was from Coke, Samsung or any non-affiliated company no-one would have batted an eyelid.

This isn’t a process question, they can sell the rights however they like, it’s an ownership issue and a flaw in the fair play regulations.
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SportBusiness July 2011

The farce that was FIFA’s recent Presidential election raises some interesting questions about the relationship between brands and governing bodies.

Most media commentators have no appreciation of the enormous investment and business engagement required to work with a property like the World Cup, so the central thrust of all media coverage was the naïve question – are sponsors are about to walk away? The answer of course was no.
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SportBusiness June 2011

Over the last decade, the world of sport sponsorship has slowly woken up to the relevance of Corporate Responsibility. In the corporate world, I really don’t know who could lay greater claim to pioneering than Laureus, who launched in 2000 with a uniquely clear proposition to link sport and CR. And only in the last five years have sport and CSR begun to become mainstream, with ‘grassroots’ sponsorship components now (thankfully) almost mandatory.

But whilst the proponents of community sport have long understood the additional reach and relevance offered by grassroots engagement, corporate reaction to community or CR-led activity is far from consistent. Some businesses, such as Puma or Timberland, manage to leverage corporate values effortlessly into consumer-facing activity. Other brands, most brands actually – struggle

Over the last three months, Redmandarin has been conducting research into the relationship between CR and marketing. We have interviewed over 50 directors or heads of CR and sustainability for, generally, global businesses and we’re just embarking on quant, online.
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SportBusiness May 2011

The BOA began this Olympic cycle boldly with the appointment of Sir Clive Woodward, someone who genuinely understands how to build a culture of success. His BOA Coaching Support Programme defined the three criteria, beyond talent, of a winning profile: teachability – are you genuinely prepared to learn and apply that learning? pressure – how do you respond? and attitude – are you attitudinally a winner?

Sir Clive’s programme was put on ice in December, after review by Deloitte: programme costs were higher than the BOA could afford and not justifiable against impact on 2012 performance. But let’s not kid ourselves Sir Clive’s programme costs mushroomed unexpectedly. Money has always been tight. Did the BOA Board sanction a programme of this kind without forecasting the impact on resource? Or authorise the expenditure without knowing whether this was sustainable? Or was it gambling on the combination of London 2012 and Sir Clive to pull in sponsors?
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SportBusiness April 2011

Despite the best efforts of the EU and the procurement profession to objectify tendering processes, much of business will remain driven by relationship. We’re all prepared finally to acknowledge that consumer purchase is driven by emotional, not rational processes, but there’s a prevailing fiction that business behaves differently.

Of course, benchmarking and transparency all support the purpose of comparison, and some tendering processes acknowledge the importance of chemistry, but human nature has an insuppressible tendency to subvert automated systems which dehumanize, and remove the human dimension. And commercial relationships are more likely to survive the inevitable stresses of business life when they are founded in emotion.
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First published in SportBusiness

Redmandarin are great believers in definition, as a foundation for planning, creativity and accountability. It underpins the thinking we apply to the challenges facing our clients. We published Defining Sponsorship to articulate Redmandarin’s vision of sponsorship’s essence and potential.

And along the way, we had some fascinating conversations. Respected figures from the industry – Tony Ponturo, Patrick Nally, David Wheldon, Simon Lowden, Simon Thompson and many more – saying things we didn’t expect them to, showing the ‘party line’ of the sponsorship industry to be a convenient fiction.

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