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The birth of anti-sponsorship?
by Jordi Connor.
We know how celebrity endorsements normally work: a brand identifies someone with a high profile who is respected by core consumers and who embodies what the brand is all about, or wants to be all about. Then they pay them handsomely to kindly endorse the product.
But it’s not always as straightforward as it sounds. Some brands have teamed up with the most unlikely partners, while others have learned the hard way that celebrities are humans too, and that means they can make mistakes and decisions that you don’t want your brand associated with.
One of the inherent dangers of being an aspirational or fashionable brand that is not priced to make it all-but inaccessible to the very lucky few is that you will also be worn by undesirables who want your brand to rub off on them. Even brands that are ‘out of reach’ can find themselves associated with consumers they hadn’t deliberately targeted - look at how hip-hop stars and professional footballers have embraced Bentley.
This, combined with the modern phenomenon of reality TV shows and the glorification of the minor celebrity with limited talent but a huge thirst for fame, can result in a brand receiving more exposure from accidental off-brand associations than their much-crafted, paid-for work.
But if your brand is strong enough, it won’t be affected. You can choose who you do, but not – so far as consumers are concerned – who you don’t want to be associated with. Once you release your products into the public domain, you concede the right to dictate how they are used and who by.
While offering to pay someone to not associate with your brand might be a simple reversal of the traditional model of paying someone to endorse your brand, it isn’t particularly creative or viable.
Had a precedent has been set, we might have started seeing smarter minor celebrities attempt to ‘extort’ lucrative ‘anti-sponsorship’ arrangements with brands who would want nothing to do with them.
However this was very much a publicity stunt – if there really was a serious concern driving this, Abercrombie and Fitch would not have deliberately drawn so much attention to it. Instead you actually had the brand’s CEO publically joking about it at a financial briefing.
As an exercise to generate some buzz and get people talking about Abercrombie and Fitch it worked. But as a method of stopping people from wearing a brand, it is not the start of something new.
Jordi Connor is head of insight, Dialogue141
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