I'm big and powerful part 2

In part 1 I talked about sponsorship's six levels of I'm big and powerful. Which sounds like an internal IMG training mantra - but isn't.

Inspired by that, I wanted to take a look at: the Three winning ways to relate to your sponsorship.

The first, 'proud sponsor', is a humble inoffensive role. 'We're sensitive to the fact that we're a mere sponsor, and potentially an uninvited guest for the average fan.'

And a cop-out, albeit a humble, inoffensive cop-out. We believe in our sponsorship but don't feel it appropriate to step into the limelight. We clearly aren't that interesting, don't really have anything to say and lack the confidence to expose ourselves any more. We're too nervous to express publicly how we relate as a business to something from outside of our comfort zone, so we won't. From a corp comms POV, it's strictly bunker mentality: head down and wait for the dust to settle.

This position can of course be nuanced with humour. Carlsberg are proud sponsors, but probably the best proud sponsors in the world. Humour of course isn't without risk, as anyone remembering Budweiser's 2006 World Cup campaign will agree. You bring the football and we'll bring an attempt at self-parody that failed to convince that it was.

Understatement can of course be turned around to genuine modesty by brands which are clearly indispensable to event functioning - such as Avaya or IBM. But only in the case of those brands who understand that product and service integration into the property is a good starting point.
The Big Simple Business Metaphor is another popular route, number two.

We're fleet of foot, agile, responsive and a great team player - in the case of football sponsor. Oh, and F1, rugby, tennis, athletics, basketball, pretty much everything but chess, to be honest.
Again, business analogy comes in different sizes.

ING was doing a good job of its sponsorship of F1 simply by demonstrating such palpable enthusiasm. Who wouldn't want to do business with a company that is prepared to be enthusiastic? What other banks show enthusiasm, for god's sake?

'Precision, sensitivity, control and responsiveness… all skills required to compete and succeed at the top of women’s tennis and women's real life.' Unmistakably Whirlpool. Think about it long enough and the machines themselves start to flit across the court to the delight of the crowd.

It can all go awry when the BSBM is word-smiff'd. Did RBS Make it happen with Williams? What did its B2B guests really think faced with that unlikely pairing of post Nike positivism and long odds. We bet hopefully on outsiders? (In retrospect, pure prescience, of course - or an insight into corporate unconsciousness, a Freudian revelation of the RBS shadow.)

Thanks heavens then for Accenture - or Mark Ritson's thesis would be harder to rebut. A company that can legitimately argue that its brand essence, or at least a prime purchase driver, is embodied in Tiger Woods' perennial high performance, a true marriage of brand and property proposition. I wonder what they'll do next.

Is a perfect marriage so hard to find? It depends on your ambition, I suppose. Ultimate high performance metaphors ARE hard to find. But if we take Martin Sorrell's point about brands needing to own single big ideas, there's plenty of scope. Marmite would naturally have sponsored Mourinho. Okay, impractical, but the League Managers Association might not be.

The point is about self-definition and the eternal tension for brands represented by Marmite. Am I prepared to stand for something in consumers' minds, knowing that not everyone will like me?