Allow me to introduce myself, myself, myself…
Here’s one… imagine going to a dinner party and introducing yourself by repeating your name three times to each person you walked up to? I’d suspect you’d be quickly labelled an ‘odd ball’ or at best a bit ‘quirky’.
Unless your dinner party is being hosted in an echo chamber, the chances of this happening in real life are somewhat slim. The sports industry however... now that’s a different kettle of fish.
And so to Thursday Thought #4: To enable their partners to provide valuable make-goods at the outset of the pandemic, the ICC enabled four nations to utilise their front of shirt for the first time to promote a partner. In Australia, we saw Alinta Energy adorning the Test team shirt along with the shorter format strips. Initially, this relaxing of the rules was to be a short-term fix, however it’s now accepted that this new asset will be in place for the longer term.
So what’s my issue? Surely this was a swift and smart move by Cricket Australia to help provide value-add to a Platinum partner? Yes, it was (is), but my gripe comes down to how this valuable opportunity was executed…
Alinta Energy already had a sleeve patch along with a right breast patch on the test team shirts. Adding the chest provided a ‘three card flush’ and effectively dominated one of the most valuable bits of commercial real estates in the game of Cricket.
To use this opportunity to say your name three times is what leaves me perplexed. Why? Well, it would certainly bolster the media value so I can see that point, but for what benefit? Alinta’s move into cricket was to support brand growth outside of their homeland in WA, so wouldn’t it have been a better opportunity to use this new spot to promote their creative cricket proposition (Supporting Your Home Team) to compliment the two other brand placements?
Perhaps all isn’t what it seems, and the ICC mandated whomever takes that spot to only amplify existing placements? That would make sense when considering Sandals did exactly the same with their ‘Windies’ opportunity. Maybe it all came about too quickly to secure the internal alignment to run a different message on the chest. Who knows but those involved at the time, but my point is this. We must look beyond a logo to find success in sponsorship… As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t run a brand TVC with just a logo for 30”, so why do it through sponsorship…
This Thursday Thought isn’t aimed at Alinta, but I’m using their situation to illustrate a point. We see the same things happening all over the sports and entertainment worlds. There is significant merit in ensuring fans recognise your brand when associated with an event, but there comes a point where the repetition becomes wasteful (or to soften that, a missed opportunity).
Look at Formula One or Moto GP… If you’re interested in counting brand exposure, then fair dinkum, but if you have anything more important to say, say it.
The flipside of this is a grimy area of landing sales propositions as we saw with Vodafone’s first year back in Super Rugby where they sold data plans through virtual field signage, but clarifying a ‘reason for being’ makes sense.
When Santander first started sponsoring the British GP, nobody knew who they were; they’d only just acquired the popular bank Abbey National. So, to announce themselves to the British public they took naming rights to a huge national event to tell fans who didn’t know who they were or what they did, nothing…
We have to sharpen up. We have to respect the environment we’re going into (it belongs to the fans) but we have to help them understand who we are and why we’re there.
Don’t live in an echo chamber. If you need assistance in crafting your reason for being and folding that into your asset utilisation, give us a holla. It just takes some game-changing thinking.
