EURO 2008

Last summer the European Soccer Championship (EURO 2008) has been played in Swiss and Austria. The head sponsor of the soccer team is Nationale Nederlanden (Dutch bank). The Dutch team was one of the favorites for the title. They performed well in their group C, that wasn’t an easy group, and became group winner. The expectations were high, many people thought that the Dutch team would win EURO 2008, but in the quarter final they lost from Russia, totally unexpected. Everybody was depressed and had negative feelings about the team because they always perform badly at major championships. The last time they won the European Championship was twenty years ago (1988). But the big question is, does the loss of the team has negative influences for the (head)sponsor of the team?

Use of stimulating medicines, a responsibility of a sponsor?

Market research institute MarketResponse researched under more than 400 Dutch people about the effect of negative publicity of a sport event on the sponsors of the event or the participating teams and athletes.

One-third of the respondents get a more negative image of the sponsor, when they sponsor a team or athlete who is accused of the use of stimulating medicine. More than 25% of the respondents say that they will use less products or services when is established that the team or athlete used stimulating medicines.

The reaction of the sponsor on this statement is of major importance for the image of the sponsor. 40% of the respondents declare that they don’t want to purchase products of the sponsor in case they don’t take action. In general they think that the sponsor has to withdraw. 21% of the respondents said that spontaneous. Other actions of the sponsor to react are: fire the athlete, and don’t take the whole team out of the event.

Furthermore MarketResearch concludes that there are divided meanings about the responsibilities of the sponsor. Almost half of the respondents (45%) are of the opinion that a sponsor has to take care that the team or athletes don’t take stimulating medicines. And if they identify stimulating medicines, three-quarter thinks the sponsor attaches no blame.

Negative publicity also just publicity

ABN AMRO has chosen for sponsoring for the Volvo Ocean Race because in their eyes it was the perfect way to bring their brand under world-wide attention. The corporate values of the bank, namely integrity, teamwork, respect and professionalism were compatible with the project.

They invested sixteen months in developing, testing and building of two boats. They paid an amount of 40 million euro to invest in the boat, the crew and the marketing campaign. Against these facts they had a world-wide public of 1.5 billion viewers.

Despite the fact that the risk of sponsoring an individual athlete is more risky than sponsoring of a team, there are enough situations to think of where a sports team comes negative into publicity. But negative publicity does not always have to have a negative effect..

An example here is Hans Horrevoets, he belonged to the crew of the ABN AMRO II. During the seventh stage of the Volvo Ocean Race from New York City to Portsmouth he fell overboard due to a strong storm. It happened 1300 miles out of the coast. The crew tried to revive him, but they were too late.

In Holland there has been a research accomplished to investigate what the effects of sports team non-performance on the corporate brand image of the sponsoring company were. The research is not finished yet, but they can already conclude that in the situation of ABN AMRO it did not had a significant negative effect on the corporate brand image. It even can help, sometimes unintentional and in this case not that proper, realize your communication goals.

Because in the end, negative publicity is just a form of publicity..