This Kat passed a pleasant hour and a half at the
British Brands Group's annual Brands Lecture this evening, in which an earnest but engaging Scot, Austin Lally (President, Braun, and former Vice-President, Gillette), spoke on "Sports marketing: unleashing the passion". Austin confessed himself to be a passionate supporter of Celtic FC so much so that he clearly wasn't thinking about that team's great historical rivals Rangers when stating that it was pretty well unheard of for a football club to
destroy itself. Anyway, recalling how speedily the BBG has made the texts of its Brands Lectures publicly available in previous years, this blogger has no intention of typing up the whole thing in long-paw. But here are a few of the highlights:
* Sports marketing is in effect a relationship-building exercise in which a brand owner makes use of the passion that is generated by sports when identifying its positive values and matching those values with the brands which you are marketing.
* Red Bull's sponsorship of Felix Baumgartner's massive sky jump (you can watch it here; over 27 million people already have) is the paradigm of sports marketing: it attracted vast swathes of consumer attention, gave considerable and prominent exposure to the sponsoring brand. It also matched the ethos of the Red Bull product by "going the extra mile" and validated the slogan "Red Bull gives you wings".
* While originally sports marketing was local, because sport was played on a local basis, it has since gone through a national, patriotic phase and is now a global phenomenon. This is of great value to brands which are marketed globally, since it creates a sort of economy of scale for the high spending which sports sponsorship attracts.
* While a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report of December 2011 indicated that the current spend on all sports marketing is a whopping $100 billion (inclusive of sponsorships, merchandising, endorsements and transmission rights), its potential remains largely untapped in the growth markets of China, India and Brazil, among other places.
There's lots more besides, but this should whet your appetite. You can check out the previous Brands Lectures
here.
