Sponsor Right Protection at Mega-Events: Examples from the London 2012 Olympic Games

Most academic literature relating to Olympic sponsorship and sponsor media suggests that while sponsors have a stake in their association with the event itself, it can be more efficient to associate themselves with the host destination (Brown 2000a, 2000b; Chalip 2000b, 2004; O’Brien 2006; O’Reilly, Heslop, and Nadeau 2011). However, sponsors’ domination of the Olympic Brand can limit the opportunities of other stakeholders and businesses to capitalise on the event. Unlike smaller-scale sport events, where sponsorship-related marketing activities are less controlled, Olympic sponsorship has over the last few decades witnessed a growing complexity in protecting sponsors’ rights and their monopoly of association with the event and its host destination. This chapter explores some of the key issues related to Olympic sponsorship with examples provided from the London 2012 Olympic Games. The first section of this chapter focuses on the protection of the Olympic brand by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG). The second section outlines some examples of strategies used by sponsors to monopolise their use of the Olympic brand and restrict associations made with the event and destination by other stakeholders. This chapter is part of a broader qualitative empirical research project undertaken at Bournemouth University in the UK. The research explored multi-stakeholders’ perspectives of leveraging the London 2012 Olympic Games for long term outcomes and the limitations of such leverage. The study was underpinned by an interpretivist mode of enquiry (Guba and Lincoln 2005) to understand the context of a phenomenon that is still an under-researched area. For this purpose, the authors applied purposeful sampling as a dominant strategy (Flick 2009; Walliman 2011). The lead researcher conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with key informants who represented organisations that were stakeholders in the London 2012 Olympic Games. All informants held managerial or organisational roles related to the 2012 Games. The majority of the findings for this chapter came from 8 of the 20 interviews, with informants from VisitBritain, UK Trade and Investment, London and Partners, Tourism Alliance, the Olympic Research Centre, 2012 Team South-West, the London Business Network, and EDF Energy. Overall, interviews lasted up to 90 minutes. Once all data were collected, the authors engaged in a thematic analysis process. Data were organised and broken down into manageable units and then synthesised (Spencer, Ritchie, and O’Conner 2003). NVivo 10 was used to assist the steps of analysis in indexing and coding (Walch 2003; Bazeley 2007). For this chapter, stakeholders’ perspectives were critically discussed and augmented by previous academic literature with an immersion of both examples discussed with those stakeholder-informants and the reflections of the authors. Two tables are provided as summaries of key issues and examples explored in this chapter.