Richard Newton looks at how companies are moving beyond simple sponsorship and developing pop events to promote their brands
When Tennents, Bass's Scottish lager brand, was threatened by an invasion of bottled premium lagers from the Continent, its marketing strategists' response was to have a party and invite some pop stars. "T in the Park" was born and became Scotland's biggest live rock festival.
Last year Midland Bank decided that, rather than advertise competitive interest rates or sponsor opera, the best way to stand out from the crowd of high street banks was by paying £1m to host a two-week pop music extravaganza at Battersea Power Station on the south bank of the Thames.
Ballantine's, the third largest whisky brand in the world, decided the best way to present itself to a new audience was to abandon the heather and tartan heritage and sponsor a quasi-punk dance band called the Prodigy who would perform at a programme of urban snowboarding displays.
Obvious marketing strategies? Hardly.
Any attempt to use pop music to springboard a consumer brand into the subconscious of younger consumers is fraught with risk. Pitch the association wrongly and, according to Richard Gower, Allied Domecq's international marketing director for Ballantine's, "the brand looks as cool as your old man squeezing into a tight pair of Levi's".
Yet marketeers increasingly love pop music. Pop is becoming so much the marketing medium of choice for consumer brands that one of the world's most famous bands has decided to turn the relationship between pop star and desperate sponsor on its head.
The Spice Girls have pre-empted marketing directors by appointing their own specialist marketing agency to source sponsors for their Spiceworld world tour.
According to Iain Ferguson, the chief executive of KLP, the Spice Girls' new marketing agent, his latest client will be perfect for a select group of international brands. "They are young; they are girls, they are in charge of their own lives; they represent sex and rock and roll but not drugs. All this makes them pretty unique.
"There are a number of big brands who want to be in that area but the Spice Girls have realised that inappropriate sponsorship relationships can be just as damaging to them as to the commercial partner."
Posh, Scary and the other Spices have had to be more circumspect after they appeared to be cashing in on their runaway success by endorsing all manner of products, from crisps to dolls and Polaroid cameras, in the run-up to last Christmas.
There is a fine line that separates corporate-artist relationships. Cross it and the brand looks clumsy and the band is labelled a sell-out.
Louis Parker, the agent for the Prodigy, said: "The benefit to the band is obvious - they get paid. The benefit to the product is that it can get pushed. But the bands are always concerned about sponsorship because it can affect their credibility."
The reason the commercial partners want to get involved is more complex.
At the heart of such relationships sits a marketing director who wants to open a "dialogue" between the brand and the consumer but finds traditional forms of advertising and sponsorship increasingly ineffectual.
In the 1950s and 60s, when the era of mass marketing began, consumers would cluster in easily definable socio-economic groups and sit in front of the TV to be talked at by advertisers.
Nowadays life is not so simple. A marketing research forum called ROAR (which stands for Right of Admission Reserved) identified nine sub sets of 15- to 24-year-old consumers.
Ferguson agreed: "Nobody sits in obligingly straightforward groups anymore and this makes it a more interesting game. Brands such as Ballantine's, Tennents, Virgin and Midland came to the conclusion that the traditional means of talking to the audience was not working."
Pop music is the ideal medium because it is one of the main passions of the elusive target audience.
But to impress a sophisticated consumer this meant doing more than just "badging" events and paying a large fee to hang your banner above a stage.
According to ROAR, such an approach guarantees nothing but ridicule. Unless a brand brings something extra for the consumer it is regarded as trying to hijack the consumer's interests and its unsophisticated marketing skills reflect upon the brand.
This is why celebrity endorsement of products, as Pepsi did with megastars such as Michael Jackson in the 1980s and early 1990s, is regarded with caution.
More recently Allied Domecq's Kahlua, the coffee liqueur, chose to sponsor the band M People in order to increase the awareness of the brand in new markets. The advertising slogan became "music for your mouth" and the audience was served Kahlua cocktails and mini-CDs containing M People music were neck-mounted on bottles. Without Kahlua the band would not have performed in the countries they did.
On the other hand, when Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company, sponsored a concert headlined by the band Jamiroquai called "Jam in the Park" last year it was labelled naive by marketing experts for not adding more value to the event.
Rather than add to the party, some brands have gone even further and created them: Tennents served "T in the Park"; Midland's held MiDLAND 97; Virgin Cola organised V96 and, subsequently, V97; and Ballantine's invented the extraordinary Urban High-Prodigy events in Berlin, Prague, Milan, Valencia, Paris, and Moscow.
By creating an event Ballantine's won approval from the "brand bouncing' younger market. For the Prodigy the deal is equally valuable.
"They allowed us to appear in front of 250,000 people in Moscow which we would not have been able to do without their joint involvement," said Parker.
While pop music remains attractive to marketing men despite the risk, the bottom line remains the same. Ferguson says: "If the product is no good then all the bands in the world won't make the difference."
