Ethics and Ambush Marketing: Where should we draw the limits?

March 12th, 2012 • 1 comment Uncategorized

As the term comes to a close, I am convinced that no product, whether it is a commodity or a specialty good can hope to achieve great sales and profit without effective promotions and advertising. Now that it is known that marketing and eye catching promotions are very important, I started thinking about ethics in marketing and whether there really are some rules about what limits a company can go to in order to garner greater awareness. That’s when I came across this blog, and I saw a huge horde of examples of companies relying on ambush marketing to increase awareness at major events. Ambush marketing is defined by Campbell, the writer of the blog as “a marketing campaign that takes place around an event but does not involve payment of a sponsorship fee to that event”.

My favourite example of ambush marketing is the instance of the Butch beer brand Bavaria NV employing about 30 scantily clad women in Bavaria yellow clothing to attend a FIFA world cup game in South Africa. While Budweiser was the official beer partner for the games, Bavaria got all the free publicity it wanted what with even the daily newspaper in Johannesburg carrying a picture of the women on its front page!

Ambush marketing is always a sore point for the official partnering firms of an event and the event organizers. In the above example, these women were swiftly escorted out of the games and were reportedly detained and questioned for several hours. It is indeed important for the major sporting events to protect the interests of their sponsors and the main reason for this is that the majority of the event’s revenue typically comes from sponsorship deals and TV and marketing rights. In fact in the above case, a report from 2009 indicated that 97% of FIFA’s revenue came from TV and marketing rights out of which sponsoring rights make up a big portion.

While I do agree that some level of protection against competitors should definitely be given to the official sponsors of the event, my main point of contention is about where we draw the limits. I leave you with this incident, my readers: During the Cricket World Cup of 2003, when Pepsi was the official soft beverage, an innocent family was escorted from a match just for drinking rival brand Coca Cola!

Plus, isn’t cheeky marketing always more fun than prim and proper marketing? (wink!)