What is being done to deter ambush marketing? Are these attempts working?

This paper examines industry responses in Australasia and Europe to the growing practice of ambush marketing, to establish whether the measures that have been put in place to deter the practice have indeed prevented the ‘ambush’ effect, whereby audiences associate non-sponsoring organisations with particular sporting events. Although some of these measures may be more effective than others in blocking ambush attempts, they also come with potentially negative consequences for event sponsors

The semiology of changing brand image

This article considers the attempted change to the image of an established brand by studying the semiotics within the brand’s historical advertising campaigns. The use of semiotics to study the interpretation of messages is discussed, and the link between interpretation of messages and advertising effectiveness in changing brand image is explored. The authors deconstruct advertisements of a brand to provide a model containing opposing dialectics that may aid managers by highlighting alternative symbolic messages contained in advertisements. Oncwe identified, these alternative symbolic messages may be used to help change brand image and influence advertising effectiveness. Although the study focuses upon a major brand of beer, this is an industry in which there are numerous small firms, and many of those have constrained marketing budgets, and thus need to make sure that their advertising is effective. Equally, entrepreneurial marketing is not to found only in the small firm, and the case study discusses a radical and imaginative brand repositioning of a well established product

Sponsorship Returns: The value of naming rights

Sponsorship is an important communication tool yet evidence of its effectiveness is often sketchy as many sponsors fail to conduct rigorous evaluation programmes. Suggests that this study of a major Australian sporting event over three years, that certain conditions, such as naming rights, may assist sponsors in securing some return from their investments, but also cautions them against unrealistic expectations. © 1997, MCB UP Limite

Ambush marketing and the football world cup

The last two decades have witnessed a rapid growth in commercial sponsorship, accompanied by an increasing prevalence of ambush marketing activities. Worldwide sponsorship spending was US$53.1 billion in 2013, compared with US$5.6 billion in 1987. It was projected to be US$55.3 billion in 2014 with a forecast growth rate of 4.1 per cent (IEG, 2014). Sponsorship, as one of the key marketing communication tools, is widely used by companies to increase brand awareness, improve brand image, reach large numbers of global consumers, generate goodwill and build community relations. Sport is the major category of sponsorship spending, accounting for approximately 70 per cent of global spending. International sporting events, like the Football World Cup and Olympic Games, provide fertile ground for marketing campaigns to achieve worldwide recognition due to the high profile of these events