Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand by David D'Alessandro & Michele Owens

Author:David D'Alessandro & Michele Owens [D'Alessandro, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2001-04-19T14:00:00+00:00

THE ATHLETES AND THEIR ENTOURAGES

The third group of players with whom you will probably find yourself negotiating in a sports sponsorship are athletes and their advisors.

Anybody who sponsors the bureaucracy of pro sports without linking his or her brand to the heroics of men and women on the field is probably making a mistake. Reebok, an official licensee and supplier of the 1996 Olympic Games, offers a great lesson in how to waste money by concentrating on the wrong people. I was there in Atlanta for the Games, and I noticed something peculiar about people’s feet as I walked around. The officials were all wearing Reebok shoes, but the athletes all seemed to be wearing Nike.

Of course, nobody cared what the officials wore, but everybody cared what American runner Michael Johnson wore when he became the first man in history to win gold medals in both the 200-meter and the 400-meter races. He wore a flashy pair of gold Nikes, which became a central player in the drama of the Games when he gave the shoes to his parents in tribute after his record-breaking performance in the 400. It was a highly emotional moment, pure catnip to broadcasters, who proceeded to spend the next 24 hours blasting closeups of Johnson’s gold Nikes into living rooms across the globe. Not surprisingly, surveys after the Games found that a higher percentage of consumers credited nonsponsor Nike with Olympic sponsorship than Reebok.

At John Hancock, we frequently invite world-class athletes to appear at both our business and our charitable events. We try to create as many opportunities as possible for our customers and distributors to meet these athletes. We want people to link our brand with their achievements and to understand that, as a sports sponsor, we help make those achievements possible. But there is one way in which we’d rather not follow the Nike lead: We do not attach our brand too closely to any specific spokesperson.

We simply have no appetite for the risk, though the upside can be huge. In 1998, Fortune magazine ran a story called “The Jordan Effect” that credited Michael Jordan with $2.6 billion worth of sales for Nike. Fortune theorized that the impact he’d had on the Nike brand was probably worth at least that much again.

The downside, however, can be equally huge, especially if you marry your brand to one of pro sports’ seemingly endless supply of tabloid-friendly dunces. Make no mistake, consumers will judge your brand by the company it keeps. Yet, incredibly, brand builders still walk straight into dysfunctional relationships with their eyes open. Converse Shoes, for example, signed Dennis Rodman to a multiyear endorsement deal in 1997, just two weeks after he kicked a courtside photographer in the groin during a Chicago Bulls game. The problem was, after that little performance, what mother in her right mind would buy her son a pair of shoes that made him feel like Dennis Rodman? Needless to say, Converse’s All-Star Rodman shoe was not a success.

Nike, of course, has done more to popularize the idea of the athlete as rebel than any other brand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.