Sponsoring sport - the golden goal?

Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of last year’s Olympic Games was a real landmark.

At a time when society is increasingly expecting businesses to demonstrate that they play a positive, responsible role in the world, sponsorship is the ideal moment to do something really impressive and really public, and get the rewards that leadership deserves. 

At London 2012 Coca-Cola did some impressively positive things, judging by any standards. Whether it’s the fact that 73% of drinks consumed at the Games were Coca-Cola’s water, juice or no/low-calorie brands; the fact that 100% of bottles were recyclable and the £15million invested into a new UK recycling plant to handle them; the 1000 young people given the chance to carry the torch as a Future Flame for their community; the investment in the Special Olympics to create sporting opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities; or the hundreds of environmental pledges made by athletes at the in-park sustainability hub created by Coca-Cola (I could go on – read more here), this was a wide-ranging, innovative and really committed demonstration of a company doing the right thing, in a relevant way at the right moment.

WWF-UK CEO David Nussbaum sees it as a new benchmark that other sponsors will be expected to reach, “The work Coca-Cola has undertaken to reduce its impact at the Games, and the lengths to which it has gone to use the power of its brand to engage others and ensure its actions have a lasting impact is to be commended and sets a standard for future corporate sponsors of international events”.

We worked with Coca-Cola to produce London 2012: Our Sustainability Legacy, detailing how the company achieved their most sustainable sponsorship to date in order to inspire and guide others wanting to deliver a truly sustainable event of their own. It provides new best practice models, including one for measuring and managing carbon impacts; another for an innovative, efficient waste recycling system for large events. Last week the final piece of the jigsaw was added when Demos published the results of their review to quantify the social impact of Coca-Cola’s London 2012 sponsorship – see the headlines here.

Models are one thing – there are three in the links above to get you started if you’re responsible for (or sponsor of) a big event.  But they’re not enough. It’s putting it into practice that matters for the brand and for us all. Coca-Cola did it at London 2012. 2013 brings the World Athletics Championship, the African Cup of Nations, the Rugby League World Cup, the Australian Open, as well as the conclusion to the Champions League, Wimbledon and all the other annual sporting highlights. Which of the many corporate sponsors will step up and take gold? It requires commitment and investment but there’s a big prize on offer.

Start with the consumer and work backwards

Read Giles' contribution to the Base London report, outlining his thoughts on what will motivate the public to change their travel behaviours – to use different forms of transport or drive different vehicles or travel at different times or drive differently.

Reality and Perception

Congratulations to Marc Mathieu for continuing the current debate in the marketing world about the power of brands to drive social progress. This is about getting marketing teams to realise that when sustainability is made real, relevant and interesting to consumers, it can drive brand integrity and increase sales.

Step into the ring Puma and its clever little bag. This innovation, using 65% less paper than its old red shoeboxes, is a favourite: it’s genuinely ‘good’, it visually ‘good’ and it involves the consumer, who can use the bag over and over again. That little bag is a big platform for indicating to the world that Puma has values beyond profit. That’s why it’s so important that this kind of innovation is backed up by a credible strategy, and that’s also why it’s so relevant for corporate responsibility teams.

Mathieu has long been an advocate of the social power of brands. His latest suggestion is that marketing teams need to use a new language: one that’s more about people than profit objectives and targets. Those of you who read Greg Smith’s explosive resignation letter to Goldman Sachs this week might find that idea particularly topical. In it, he explained that he could no longer work for a company that talked internally about profit before people; that failed to put the interests of the customer at its heart. This is far from the image that the financial giant projects to its clients. So if the accusations are true, Goldman appears to have made its clever little bag before getting its house in order.

All this comes down to the simple question of whether the reality of a company’s values and sustainability is weaker or stronger than the image publicly projected. Sustainable Brands points to evidence that having a strong sustainability reality can reduce costs and risks, while achieving a strong perception of sustainability can drive up brand equity. Achieving both a reality and a perception of sustainability might seem the obvious thing to do, but too often those in charge of change fail to communicate it, and those in charge of communications fail to ensure the image they want to project is a reality. The current debate around the social role of marketing is good, but unless it sparks marketing teams to talk to strategy and corporate responsibility teams internally, we’re at risk of being flooded by greenwash.

Inspire us, Don't scare us

The power of brands to inspire us and change our behaviour is huge.

The challenge to create a sustainable future for people and planet is huge.

So surely the opportunity to harness the power of brands, marketing and advertising to create a sustainable future is a match made in heaven. You’d have thought so, but the problem is that so few brands are seeing, or stepping up to, the role they can play.

Get it right and your brand could just be the disruptive force that makes us think in a different way (about the world and your brand). Makes us re-look at the way we have always done things. Inspires us to be better. Drives us to a more sustainable future.

The drive bit at the end is actually what inspired me to write this. BMW have just launched its stand alone sub-brand, called BMW i, with the motto “Born Electric”. The car maker is rebranding its sustainable vehicles division in an effort to differentiate its upcoming line of electric vehicles.

What caught my eye is the video on its new website. The video is not about reducing things. It’s not about stopping what you are doing or having a worse life.

It’s about inspiring us to do more. It’s about having a better life. It’s about thinking about things in a different way.

Okay, so BMW aren’t going to stop producing gas guzzlers for the foreseeable future, but if they can stimulate greater consumer demand for change by inspiring more of us to think differently, we might move more quickly towards a more sustainable future.