Ambush marketing is a technique used by companies to take advantage of other company’s events that have no official obligation to sponsor that event. This strategy is mainly found in sports activities like crickets, football, and the Olympics. In ambush marketing, one company offers to sponsor a certain event, and one of its competitors links itself to the event without paying the sponsorship fee. In this kind of marketing, the non-sponsors use symbols, words, players related to the sporting event to indicate an impression of being an official sports sponsor. The non-sponsors can also finance an event broadcast out doing the main sports supporters. For example, a company can display its banners in a stadium or make a certain number of sports spectators wear clothing that promotes its products. The company may also use promotional giveaways using its official logo, a symbol related to the sport.
Ambush marketing is having got its pros and cons in an event. The main advantages of ambush marketing are: it enables a competitor company to increase awareness of its products (Halvadia et al., 2010). It also increases the visibility of its products at a lower cost. Ambush marketing makes a company's brand gain great public attention at a very low cost since they take advantage of a sponsoring company to market its products. It also promotes the local companies that can not afford to sponsor large events and acquire public attention, improve product visibility, and awareness.
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On the other hand, ambush marketing poses a problem for the sponsoring company. It generates lower returns to the sponsoring companies through promoting its brand's awareness, brand visibility, and the benefits the company can acquire from the public event in correlation to the amount they used to fund the event. It also demotivates the company to invest a large amount of money as they become event sponsors. Additionally, it relies heavily on space and time as it depends on fast response and collaborative planning to ensure its success. The condition is worsened by unavailability or high inventory cost required to put the ad up. Therefore, ambush marketing reduces the commercial value of an event and negatively impacts an event, sponsor company, and event viewers.
The Bavaria beer was ambush marketing in South Africa to improve the awareness of their brand to the spectators in the field. The company was also aiming to enhance their market positions and concept creation efforts. By that, they wanted to visualize their brand at the minimum cost possible. They were also hoping to acquire positive brand transfer for their competitors to innovatively relate themselves with Budweiser without paying for the commercialization. I would consider ambush marketing is unethical business practice. It’s because the ambush activity destroys the main sponsor's event and the interest of the sports authorizing bodies and sportspeople. It also reduces the event sponsor's brand visibility as people concentrate on both brands and, therefore, demotivates sponsors and reduces their return.
Ambush marketing can either be intentional or unintentional. I can be intentional when a competitor company intentionally tries to relate to the event in which it has no right. The main aim could be to reduce the popularity of the event sponsors and ensure that they have not promoted their brand. On the other hand, a company uses ambush marketing unintentionally when they just want to create awareness to the people about brand existence in the market, but with no objective of demotivating the event sponsors. Also, the competitors may lack adequate funds to sponsor an event.
As an organizational leader, I would not allow ambush marketing practices. It reduces the commercialization value of the sponsoring company. Ambush marketing does not give a clear perception of the event viewers about the original event sponsors and sometimes has a good perception of competitors brand. Sometimes the sporing organization pays a lot of money for the event and has low brand awareness. Therefore, it would be ethically right to practice ambush marketing.
Reference
Halvadia, N., Patel, V., & Nayak, N. (2010). Ambush Marketing and Its Impact. Journal of Marketing, 12 (12), 4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292216467_Ambush_Marketing_and_Its_Imact
