The Olympic rings hide a multitude of sins
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Dow Chemical, a long time global supporter of the Olympic movement, is funding a £7m fabric wrap to encircle the London Olympic Stadium. The size of the deal and the prominence it will provide Dow throughout the Games has angered India, where the company is still widely vilified for its link to the Bhopal disaster in which, says Greenpeace, 20,000 Indian citizens were killed and thousands more injured by a poisonous leak from the Union Carbide chemical plant in 1984.
Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001, 16 years after the Bhopal disaster and after $470m in compensation had been paid out. But Indian anger remains directed at Dow because of the subsequent problems that the people of Bhopal continue to endure. Health and human rights groups claim high rates of congenital deformities and cancers because most continue to depend on groundwater still contaminated with pesticides from the original disaster.
Local politicians from Madhya Pradesh, where Bhopal is located, first approached the Indian sports minister in October to ask for an Indian boycott of the London Olympics because of Dow’s involvement. The request attracted considerable media coverage in India and 21 Indian Olympians apparently wrote to Locog urging it to scrap the deal with Dow, citing it as “offensive to the spirit of the Olympic Games”.
Pressure has also been applied by Amnesty International, which released an open letter last week claiming Locog had put itself in an “untenable” situation in granting the wrap contract to Dow, in the face of its “continuing failure to address one of the worst corporate related human rights disasters of the 20th century”.
While India is currently saying it is not considering a boycott of London 2012, many are still calling for it.
How do you explain the absence of some of the bigger, smarter and more respected brands from the Olympics such as Apple, Ford or Google?
Thus far, the IOC and Locog have expressed “satisfaction” with Dow’s involvement. Olympic representatives, including Lord Coe, have pointed out that Dow did not own Union Carbide at the time of the Bhopal leak, that a compensation payment has been made and the IOC says: “Dow is a global leader in its field of business and is committed to good corporate citizenship”.
Despite the embarrassment of potentially losing Indian participation, the IOC is unlikely to back down over Dow. To jettison an Olympic sponsor because they are deemed incompatible with the Olympic brand or of possessing an unacceptable corporate reputation would be tantamount to commercial suicide.
Examine the list of 2012 sponsors and you uncover a veritable rogues’ gallery of corporate reputation that hardly adheres to the Olympic motto of ’faster, higher, stronger’. Tier 1 sponsors include brands like BP, which many would deem one of the most distrusted and disliked corporations on the planet. Right next to it is Lloyds TSB, a brand I consider so poorly managed that it would have gone out of business without public funding. Further down the list is Thomas Cook, which would perhaps not have needed its emergency cash bailout last week if it hadn’t already blown £20m to sponsor 2012.
A century ago sponsorship began with a genuine relationship between a supplying company and an event keen to borrow or even acquire its services. When watch brands like Longines, TAG Heuer and Omega sponsored the early modern-day Olympics, they did so because they were manufacturing advanced time pieces that were essential to the measurement of the races. In several cases, the time pieces in question were actually purchased by the Olympic organisers. In others, the equipment was donated free for appropriate (but free) recognition.
Even into the commercial era of the 1980s, when larger and larger sums started to change hands for sponsorship opportunities, there was at least a rational link between the likes of Nike or Adidas associating their products and logos with the Olympic movement.
Today, most of the companies big enough to afford an Olympic sponsorship and desperate enough to seek out global recognition are often those most in need of reputational rescue. How else do you explain the absence of some of the bigger, smarter and more respected brands from the Olympics, like Apple, Ford or Google? These brands don’t need a massive reputational smokescreen and they also choose to spend their money far more effectively elsewhere on genuine promotions of their products and services.
The reason the IOC will keep Dow and risk losing Indian participation is not because of intransigence or a respect for the “corporate citizenship” of Dow Chemical. It’s because to only accept associations with brands consistent with the Olympic ethos would be to restrict its commercial options to the very companies that don’t need their help in the first place.
The only conceivable option for consistency would be to realign the Olympic brand so it fits the kind of brands it is likely to depend on for future sponsorship revenues. How about the motto ’dodgier, lower, weaker’ to fit that repositioning?
Readers' comments (10)
JS | Wed, 30 Nov 2011 1:27 pm
I think it's fair to say that having McDonalds as a main sponser is a good example of the IOC's 'ethos'.
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Tim Crow | Thu, 1 Dec 2011 0:00 am
As always whenever you write about sponsorship, too many sweeping generalisations and inaccuracies. You ignore, for example, the fact that a majority of the Games' sponsors are still supplying vital products and services, as has been the case throughout the modern era. Equally, to single out a troubled three or four brands as 'proof' that most of the fifty-plus sponsors are there for 'reputational rescue' is patently nonsense. And you conveniently fail to mention that Samsung (longstanding Olympic sponsor) is out-selling your beloved Apple worldwide. But then, that's what being a columnist is about, right?
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CC | Thu, 1 Dec 2011 6:12 pm
It's worth adding that Ford are automotive sponsor of the UEFA Champions League; hardly a case study of a brand opting out of the Olympics.
The 'lesser, smaller and less respected brands' you speak of often use Sponsorship as a tool to gain legitimacy, trust and awareness as a valuable method rather than traditional ATL processes.
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Anonymous | Thu, 1 Dec 2011 7:13 pm
I couldn't agree more Tim. Sorry Mark, this is lazy journalism. Marketing Week should be capable of better. Have a read of.LOCOGs accounts then tell me value in kind is dead.
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mark ritson | Fri, 2 Dec 2011 12:30 pm
Sorry - but while I am delighted when people disagree with this column - I don't like being called a lazy journalist.
Tim Crow accuses me of selectively "singling out" two or three troubled brands to make an unfair point about the 2012 Olympics.
There are only 7 Tier 1 sponsors for the Olympics.
One of which is BP - disgraceful and incompetent oil brand with massive image problems.
Another of which is Lloyds TSB - badly run bank with massive image problems and huge public debts.
Another of which is BA - badly run airline recently escaping from massively damaging long term labour problems and with image issues.
Another of which is EDF - giant French nuclear energy firm with massive image problems which was recently fined and had two of its senior executives imprisoned for corporate espionage and dirty dealings against Greenpeace.
So, by my count Tim - that would be the MAJORITY of the top tier sponsors of the 2012 Olympics having dodgy reputations and seeking to alleviate that dodginess with Olympic Rings,
My story stands. The Olympics is attracting, and will continue to attract, brands with image issues.
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Scott Bowers | Fri, 2 Dec 2011 9:45 pm
Mark, there's more holes in your argument and follow up than Sepp Blatter's bathing sponge.
The IOC has 11 worldwide TOP sponsors who are the (!) top partners of the 2012 (and other) Olympic Games, with 7 Tier 1 LOCOG partners, 7 Tier 2 and 28 Tier 3. As Tim says, a large collection.
Across the board, the brands offer services and products to deliver some aspect of the modern-day Olympic Games - from big screens in venues to medical equipment and from food to beverages.
You suggest these are not the 'bigger, smarter and more respected' brands. Well last time I blinked, Coca-Cola (Olympic sponsor since 1928), P&G, GE, Visa and so on were pretty big... And there's quite a lot of smart work done by their marketers.
The Olympic Games is not the right fit for every brand, but in your example, Samsung is there instead of Apple and BMW is there instead of Ford. Not bad!
You say the majority of brands involved with 2012 are partnering to overcome image problems, citing BA, BP, Lloyds TSB etc.
British Airways has partnered Team GB and a plethora of British sports teams and events for eons. They position their brand alongside the sporting moments we all want to travel to and the 'victorious' return of the likes of our Beijing 2008 athletes and their golden nosecone...
BP's image problem is predominantly outside the UK (obviously USA mainly) and their Tier 1 rights are UK domestic only and agreed before the Gulf of Mexico incident I presume you're referring to, so again, not sure how it's a sponsorship to mend a broken international image? Perhaps for BP it is London 2012's greenest Games in history pledge, which they are helping to deliver, that made it the right partnership for them, given they invest so heavily in renewables.
On Lloyds TSB, they became a Tier 1 partner in March 2007, which was before the economic crisis hit these shores. Besides, I thought first Northern Rock and then particularly RBS Group took the biggest reputational hits? Research I have seen (by Havas) found that Lloyds TSB, under the direction of former Redmandarin Sally Hancock, has been making great gains via its London 2012 partnership activation.
Don't tar all or the majority with a particular brush when there's 53 different reasons to partner the world's greatest sports event. If you're smart about partnership - and not all are of course - higher, faster and stronger is exactly what you get... and so does the success of the Olympic Games in return.
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Charles Batsworth | Fri, 2 Dec 2011 10:16 pm
Mark you almost nailed it -
But you missed Samsung -
Perennially embroiled in corruption and tax scandals in South Korea (their ex chief legal counsel Kim Yong-chul branded it " the most corrupt company in Asia").
Subsidiary Samsung Techwin (whose CEO has been the latest resignation over "irregularities") is a manufacturer of military hardware and in 2009 generated over $1bn in arms sales.
See http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/755
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Tim Crow | Fri, 2 Dec 2011 10:26 pm
I'll leave it to the brands you mention to respond to that Mark! All I would say is the Olympics isn't alone in attracting brands with image issues - there are plenty of other sport, cause and entertainment platforms to which this also applies - and to re-iterate that there are 53 Games sponsors in total.
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FP | Mon, 5 Dec 2011 12:48 pm
Whilst I appreciate the efforts from some of the most respected members of the sponsorship business to reply to this article, I'd politely suggest that they collectively 'save it' as 'he's not worth it' (as used nightly on Eastenders).
It would appear that the author has some deep seated issue with sponsorship as a form of marketing and has merely exampled this through the Dow story. Dull and unhelpful but really not going to have those who spend their money shouting 'Golly Prof Ritson, you're right, how could we have been so stupid! There we were thinking that people loved sports, entertainment and arts and we were happy to support them and thereby make them think better of us and buy our products and all that and after all this time it turns out that we've been wasting our money! Oh how silly we now look!'
Isn't marketing supposed to be pro-persuasion?
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A,m | Sun, 15 Jan 2012 8:25 am
The biggest crap in sponsors in that there is cadburys chocolate sponsor , y would you provide chocolates for the athletes ?
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