The Big Interview: Diageo Europe
Rory Sheridan, head of sponsorship for Diageo in Western Europe, speaks to Sport Industry Group about Guinness’ long-term associations in sport and plans to consolidate rather than expand its existing sports portfolio…
Tell us a bit about your role at Diageo?
Diageo has only become a European business in the last few years and I’m ultimately an internal specialist in the world of sponsorship for the organisation. I have to provide a level of industry expertise in the world of sponsorship and that is working with our brands to work out if sponsorship is a suitable platform for them to engage with their target market. Sponsorships – particularly in sport – aren’t for everyone; they can be an expensive commitment and if not followed through properly they won’t be effective for a brand trying to create platforms of communication for itself. So I work with our brands trying to work out if sponsorship is the right way forward for them, or if they should be investing their budget elsewhere.
For example if one of our brands wanted to go into sports, there would be no point going into a sport which is already overcrowded by existing brands, in that case it might be worth going into an area of sports that is more tailored to the brand’s needs or may fit their purpose a bit better. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many brands don’t check the basics first.
They may then have a better bang for their buck in terms of impact and effectiveness of their investment. When that comes there is a need to identify those particular assets and negotiate great deals on behalf of the brand and indeed the wider organisation. Only then comes the day to day management of those deals, the relationships of those various rights holders or assets owners, and then activation at an implementation level.
You’ve been at Diageo for a few years now. How has the sport sponsorship strategy evolved and changed in that time for you?
Sponsorship is a business in itself. It’s become more of a strategic tool for us to utilise. I’m not saying that it wasn’t sophisticated back in the day but in times past it wouldn’t have had the same level of investment – both strategically and financially – behind it. It wouldn’t have had the same level of sophistication.
Like everything else in business, things have moved on. We certainly don’t do sponsorship within Diageo just for the sake of it, it has to serve a purpose and it has to drive the business objectives at all times so therefore a great degree of rigour goes behind everything we do in order to justify the investment and make sure we maximise the opportunity. Sponsorship is a wonderful platform for us to be involved with and is hugely important because ultimately it is trying to enhance a consumer’s experience via their passion points. If a company like Diageo with various brands can enhance consumer experiences then that’s a brilliant space that our brands can play and engage with consumers in, and ultimately try to influence their choice if they are going to responsibly consume alcohol.
One famous example within your portfolio would be Guinness, and its association with rugby. It’s obviously built a very rich heritage now within the sport, but what is it for Diageo that makes that partnership work successfully for so many years?
For us, there are very few brands that are so closely connected to the values of a sport, and we believe we have one of them. The brand purpose of Guinness is the iteration of the message, ‘made of more’. Rugby fits so perfectly with that – it is all about substance, heritage, clean competition, competitiveness, and authenticity. It’s about being made of more.
These are qualities which we would attribute to the Guinness brand in terms of the genesis of the brand and how it’s conducted itself over the last 258 years. The sport is getting bigger, it’s more popular, there’s more matches, more occasions, more viewers, more content, more quality of production and a lot more opportunity for consumers to engage. It’s literally made of more! If it can also enhance consumer’s experiences around rugby, which up to this point has been a successful tool for us, then that can certainly be a benefit to Guinness.
An amazing match to end an amazing tournament. Congratulations to England, the #RBS6Nations champions. #IREvENG https://t.co/LU7cNaf96q pic.twitter.com/BRb79wqEa6
— Guinness GB (@GuinnessGB) March 18, 2017
Are the long-term associations a challenge for you? What do you do to build on them, to keep it fresh and continue to innovate?
I’ve been to a few events recently and I’ve heard the same phrase a lot – ‘innovate or die’. It’s great to find different ways of marketing our brand and our sponsorships. We have to keep things fresh. Certainly around the last two or three rugby seasons we have created pieces of content purely to publish through our social sites as video content around major events. Before we would have pushed everything into our television budget. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but the challenge is always to innovate from a brand point of view and from a marketing point of view. Like every brand we are always competing for the hearts and minds of consumers. I think the ones that will have the boldness and bravery to take activation to the next level is hugely important, for us its less about impressions from a digital perspective, it’s about experiences. If we can enhance people’s enjoyment of their passion points, experiences are what people share if you look at their social media, particularly Facebook, people are sharing their memories, sharing their great experiences and if Guinness can show up in those in a positive, non-invasive way and enhance people’s experience then that’s really important to us. That’s the space that we are operating in at the moment and a plan to continually innovate within is essential.
Looking to the future, there’s been rumours of a move into football for a few years now, are there any plans to expand the portfolio?
No plans at the moment in terms of football. We’ve been associated with certain athletes in the past, but other than that, we have some really strong partnerships in the African market, in the football-crazy market that Africa is. Guinness plays a strong role in bringing football to the fans and adding real value in terms of our sponsorships of some the national teams and the Africa Cup of Nations. We produce a lot of content in Nigeria, for example. We aren’t looking to take on any new sponsorships at this moment in time but that’s not to say we don’t look; we get lots of proposals from lots of different rights holders approaching us, which is to be expected given that we are a brand that is heavily connected with sports and we always like to keep an open mind.
When you get these proposals from different agencies and rights holders, what is it that you would like to see? And what can they do more of to appeal?
In general any entity – and that could be an agency or a rights holder – should only really approach brands that there is a natural fit for. There is nothing worse than brands that have a third party come to them and say ‘I’ve got a great idea’ as the headline. But a great idea for whom? For anyone to get to a brand and get a credible hearing it needs to be a hot property and something that generally turns the brand’s head. There are lots of wonderful ideas out there, but they are not always packaged properly. It’s about the need to turn a one size fits all solution into a new, tailored approach. I’d certainly like to see more of that happening in the future if a rights holder or selling agent is going to approach a brand in a more measured way, thinking about that brand’s needs as opposed to what the selling agent’s needs are. I think they wouldn’t do themselves any harm just by having a bit more rigour behind the thinking process before they automatically send a generic brand email out saying “dear brand”, because anyone who gets that type of approach tends to be binned quickly. I think a little bit more intelligence by sellers or rights holders and not wasting their own time, never mind a prospective sponsor’s time, by trying to sell something which isn’t really fitting nor has a proper connection with that brand. Time is precious these days and it’s a futile exercise without some original thought and a bit of effort.
