We’ve often been asked to comment on celebrity sponsorship of brands. The main questions that clients and trade journalists put to us are: “Is it a good idea or a bad idea in general?”, “How do you choose the right celebrity?”, “What do you do if the celebrity behaves badly?” and so on.
At The Value Engineers we don’t see ourselves as experts in celebrity, media planning or sponsorship, we are experts in brand strategy. So our view naturally tends to be based on a brand-centric perspective: celebrity sponsorship can be valuable for a brand but brands should always be careful to ensure that their expensive campaign activity isn’t doing more to build the profile of the celebrity than it is to promote their brand strategy.
Some examples from the past where the balance may have begun to tip too far in the celebrity’s favour include Gordon Ramsay for Gordon’s Gin and David Beckham for MegaO3 frozen foods. However an astonishing new campaign may have tipped this balance further. To my knowledge, never in the discipline of celebrity sponsorship has one celebrity benefited so much from the campaign activity of a multi-national brand. The case in point is Nike’s new US TV spot, in which the brand appears to be sponsoring the public atonement of the beleaguered golfer, Tiger Woods.
Granted, the potential pay-off of Tiger’s heroic come-back is considerable, but the decision to launch a campaign quite like this before that happens represents an unmistakable sign that, when it comes to brand sponsorship of celebrities, the tail may have begun to wag the dog.
When Gillette announced it had enlisted three heavyweights of the sporting world – Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry – to promote their new Champions campaign back in 2007, it was considered quite a coup. It appeared to be a safe strategy: to prove you are ”the best a man can get”, link yourself with sportsmen who are “the best a man can watch”. Events over the last couple of weeks, however, have highlighted the perilous nature of such sports endorsement.
First there was the ‘Hand of Gaul’ as it has come to be known – Thierry Henry’s cynical handball in the build up to the goal that put France through to the 2010 World Cup Finals at Ireland’s expense. The footballing outcry that followed soon translated into business fears for Gillette. In Ireland many people declared that, with Henry’s cheating invalidating his image as a suitable role model, they would boycott all Gillette products until he was dropped. It wasn’t long before photo-shopped joke ads like this were doing the rounds on office emails….
With all these negative associations of Henry’s handball hurting their own brand, Gillette subtly tweaked some of their communications. As The Sun spotted, on the UK and international Gillette Champions website Henry is pictured next to Federer and Woods holding a football in his left hand. However the French version showed Henry without any football, simply standing with hands in pockets, thereby eliminating any obvious link to his cheating – a perceived point of embarrassment for France. While the move may well have been savvy marketing, it does make you wonder how Gillette will react to Tiger Woods recent mysterious car crash, where his wife used a golf club to smash the windows and drag the unconscious Woods to safety. After all, a golf club is trickier to hide than a football. Maybe they’ll replace it with it with some similarly shaped inoffensive item, like a French baguette.
What Gillette’s most recent debacle really does highlight is the uncertainties underlying any sports endorsement. Struggling frozen food range GO3 have proved how not even endorsement from David Beckham will necessarily prove advantageous if the brand fit is wrong, while swimmer Michael Phelps’ drink driving and alleged drug taking show how squeaky clean appearances should be taken at face value. If a brand really is going to link itself with a breed of people as vain and unchained as famous sportsmen, they’d better be aware of the risks involved…
