Since my post last week on the dilemma facing corporate sponsors of this year’s Beijing Olympics, John Quelch, the eminent Harvard Business School marketing professor, has weighed in on the issue with an article published on the Harvard Business website. Notably, he says marketers are waiting to see if there will  be more unrest in Tibet before finalising spending plans for Olympics-related advertising:

Marketers are not overcommitting funds to Olympics-related brand advertising and promotions and the normal Olympics year advertising boost may be less than expected. Instead of long-term preset media advertising buys, many companies are planning short-term promotional bursts that they can activate as late as July and August if all appears to be in place for a successful, trouble-free Games.

Otherwise, he says Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker that is a first-time global sponsor of the games, has much more at stake than veteran backers such as Visa. Long-time Western sponsors may be pragmatically two-faced, he predicts, putting forward one message for the Chinese market that will tap into the country’s pride at hosting the games, and another, more neutral message for the rest of the world. To my untrained eye, that doesn’t necessarily look like a shift in strategy, just a reflection of the fact that sponsors might have different goals in different markets.

April 22nd, 2008 in Business schools, Ethics, Marketing | Permalink