The Big Interview – Jaguar Land Rover

Mark Cameron, global brand experience director, Jaguar Land Rover, speaks to sportindustry.biz ahead of a huge year in rugby and being “more than just cars” for Team Sky.

What is Land Rover looking to achieve from the Rugby World Cup?

It is quite multi layered and obviously depends on the market, but our focus for the UK team is building customer loyalty – particularly through a programme of hospitality innovations and events hosted around the competition. A lot of our customers around the UK have a love for rugby, that is why we are involved, so we’re trying to build that loyalty level.

Elsewhere, where Land Rover isn’t so well known – the sheer broadcast reach of the RWC is so massive – we want to communicate the brand as the premium partner in world rugby. We want to be involved in everything that sets rugby apart: the values, the grassroots and the stories behind the game, these values align with the values of Land Rover: integrity, respect, passion and dignity. It’s about getting under the skin of the game and seeing where the players came from and storytelling through creative assets.

We also have a really exciting way of using our mascots, our rights include the ability to choose the 96 children who will hold the captain’s hands for the games. We have started a campaign to recruit these children in a really fun and engaging way so we hope we’ll be able to offer them a unique perspective on the tournament.

In strategic terms, we are talking to two audiences – the rugby fans and the “big eventers”, the people around the country who are looking to get on board with the next big event and want to be part of it, the Rugby World Cup is that event. We will have 300/400 cars supporting the tournament, so we are very visible, we want to give driving experiences, building programmes around the guests from overseas, we want fan activation, taster drives in the vehicles, we may have some surprises in store too.

As you mentioned, you have a strong following from rugby fans. Is it the strong platform that developed this fanbase or was it a natural fit from the start?

Well we’ve been in rugby for over 20 years now, so it’s certainly something that has grown over time but has always been very natural for us. Three years ago we actually put that into proper form though; we worked with a media planning agency who profiled our target customer, we created statements about what they stand for and then ran it through a database which spits out results such as where their interests lie compared with the average population. In those results, rugby was by far the biggest in terms of interests (sailing and equestrian was also rated highly). It was a fascinating insight into where and who was consuming our brand.

We are directly involved in the Rugby World Cup on a global level, but all our regions are doing their own activation locally within their market in rugby. In the UK, they sponsor the Premiership, as well as a CSR programme, HITZ.

In South Africa we are sponsoring Western Province, in Australia we back a Canberra team, this all builds up to the Rugby World Cup so for us in the global team it is about setting a long-term plan.

Switching to Jaguar and your involvement in cycling – technically you are “Innovation Partner” to Team Sky, what does that mean exactly?

In short, our partnership goes well beyond just cars. Go back to 2010 when we started working with Team Sky, our main focus was to get our products visible as support cars for the team – big audiences, and their prominence in the sport helped.

In cycling it is interesting the fast growing trend of fairly wealthy and educated people that are spending huge amounts of money on bikes and are going out on weekends or evenings with like-minded people in a community to cycle. This growth could be an offshoot of the success of London 2012, or Team Sky, or personalities in the sport, but whatever the case may be, they have all benefited from Jaguar!

People know design is the DNA of the brand – we wanted to know how we can tell more of our brand story through this partnership far more than just provision of cars in a way that would interest the new audience of cycling. The guys who make the Team Sky bike – Pinarello – they don’t have the same technology we have and use day in, day out, the computer modelling and aerodynamic testing and all the things we have at our disposable for car industry. So the next question was could we apply this knowhow to the bicycle and make a difference to the ethos of Team Sky – marginal gains and marginal differences. If we could get 5% or 1%, even 0.1% improvement on aero performance that would show how we use technology. We have given designers and engineers to Pinarello to tangibly increase the performance of the bike, which is great news for everyone involved.

Everything you have covered so far is an example of being hands on as a sponsor, is this really important, being an active partner?

I have always been a firm believer that if you can strategically pick sponsorship territories you can make it enduring and long term. We haven’t decided to build our presence in pro cycling just for two years and then move on, we see a long term trend and interest in cycling. If you are able to add value back to the partner rather than just take from them, when it gets to renegotiating contracts and thinking about a share of attention it gets more leverage. It’s an equal conversation about where value is shared, not just giving money and branding rights – it has to be more!

Finally, Invictus Games – why it is important for brands such as yourself to support something like this?

Firstly, anything ‘new’ carries risk. We went into Invictus Games with the hope that it would become something more than a one off, but there was no guarantees. What inspired us to get involved was that it was something unique and original, it tapped into the sentiment of the country for supporting our war heroes, and it witnessed a huge support that Help For Heroes has as a charity.

Practically, as a business – the company Jaguar Land Rover have over 30,000 employees in UK – there’s a need for experienced leaders in technology, engineers and IT people, so there’s a rich vein of people we want to recruit from the army when they downsize. So there was a practical message we wanted to put out around our need to play a role in terms of looking after the legacy of these men and women, and actually sport is a fantastic way of giving hope, aspiration and a future to these men and women.

We felt the area of sport is great for capturing people’s attention, if you look at campaigns we have been running through Land Rover, the ethos to go above and beyond, and to strive to be higher ambitions, the brand value fitted really well with where we are already.

On top of that, you have Prince Harry, who we met a few times and we understand his huge ambition personally to drive this through, it wasn’t for him to do that, making the phone calls, getting Sir Keith Mills on board and basically building this event from scratch in eight months – that was a tall order.

The way BBC got behind it too, again it was a risk, but everything received strong audience figures and for us it was an audience you can’t usually reach through advertising because of the BBC platform. Will it continue? I have confidence it won’t be a one off and hope it will become a consistent global event and it will sit in the calendar of great sporting events that happen around the globe to make this bigger.