When reputation travels the wrong way

Imagine you are the CMO of a major brand sponsoring Manchester City right now. Not one of the businesses with links to Abu Dhabi. A conventional global brand that chose City because of everything that association could deliver; reach, relevance, success, fans, content and global profile.

Now the club is at the centre of a major story and the association that normally creates value suddenly looks rather more complicated. I’m deliberately not going to offer a view on what City’s sponsors should do. The situation is contested and subject to legal process, and I’m certainly not close enough to it to judge the individual issues. But it does raise a much bigger question about sponsorship that I don’t think we talk about enough.

What happens when the reputation you bought into starts travelling in the wrong direction?

Association works both ways

We spend a lot of time selling the positive transfer of reputation in sponsorship. Associate with this team and some of what people feel about them will rub off on you. Their success, credibility, values, cultural relevance or connection with a particular community. It’s one of the fundamental reasons sponsorship works. But the mechanism doesn’t conveniently switch itself off when things go wrong. If association can transfer positive meaning to a brand, it can transfer negative meaning too.

I’ve experienced that first-hand.

During my time at the ECB, I led the commercial partnerships team through a period when cricket was facing significant questions around racism and inclusion, brought most publicly to life through the experiences and testimony of Azeem Rafiq. It was an incredibly difficult period for the sport. It also taught me a lot about what happens to commercial partnerships when the organisation at the centre of them is facing serious reputational questions. Looking back, a few things stand out.

Know where you stand

Most significant sponsorship agreements contain provisions covering reputational damage. They are sometimes called morality clauses, sometimes drafted differently, and importantly they can work both ways. So there is a fairly obvious first job for both parties: understand your position. What does the contract actually say? What has happened? What rights exist? What can be communicated and what needs to remain confidential? Legal and communications teams obviously matter enormously here.

But knowing your legal position and managing the relationship are two quite different things.

And the latter is much more human. Remember the person on the other end of the phone. A sponsorship doesn’t exist between two logos. Very often the marketing director or CMO on the brand side was the person who championed the partnership in the first place. They built the business case, persuaded colleagues and secured the budget. They may have put a fair bit of their own political capital behind making it happen. When things go wrong, they’re then the person having to explain that decision internally.

I remember being very conscious of that during the ECB period. Our job wasn’t simply to protect cricket or persuade sponsors that everything was going to be fine. We needed to help the people on the other side of those relationships manage their own organisations. And often we didn’t have all the answers.

What mattered was keeping people informed about what we did know, being honest about what we didn’t, and being clear about when we expected to be able to tell them more. Sometimes that was in writing. Often a conversation was much more useful. Silence rarely was.

And it isn’t just the board. This is probably one of the things I hadn’t fully appreciated before experiencing it. The most senior people inside partner organisations were often relatively well informed. They had corporate affairs teams, legal advice and access to senior people at the ECB when required. But sponsorship reaches much further into an organisation than the people who approved the contract. Employees can be incredibly proud of the sports their company supports. They see the branding, attend events, share the content and tell friends that we sponsor them. That’s part of the value brands are buying. But it also means those employees have an association with the partnership. And when the issue relates to racism, inclusion, integrity, safeguarding or another important societal issue, they aren’t necessarily looking at it through the lens of sponsorship ROI or contractual rights. They’re thinking about what the association says about the company they work for. That’s a very different conversation.

So one of the most useful things a brand can do is tell the rights-holder what it is hearing. Maybe the board is comfortable but employees aren’t. Maybe customers are asking questions. Maybe an internal employee network has raised concerns. The rights-holder can’t help its partner manage pressure it doesn’t know exists.

Get the right people involved

I wasn’t an expert in racism or inclusion and pretending I was wouldn’t have helped anyone. My role was partly to make sure our partners could speak directly to the people who did understand the issues and were leading the ECB’s response. Sometimes that meant bringing subject specialists into conversations. Sometimes senior leaders needed to talk directly. Sometimes it meant CEO to CEO.

There is a wider lesson in that. The first time your CEOs speak shouldn’t ideally be during a crisis. The relationships built when things are going well become incredibly valuable when they’re not. Which is why quite a lot of reputation management actually happens when there is apparently no reputation problem to manage.

Sometimes the right activation is no activation

This one is much more practical. If your sports partner is dominating the news for all the wrong reasons, it is probably not the ideal week to spend a large amount of money reminding everybody that you sponsor them. That doesn’t automatically mean dramatically terminating the relationship. It could simply mean pausing some activity while you understand what is happening. Paid campaigns can wait. Social content can move. Hospitality might need handling differently. And it’s worth thinking about where your people are appearing publicly. A marketing director speaking at a conference about an entirely unrelated subject can suddenly find themselves answering questions about a sports partnership because it happens to be in the news. Having a clear position matters.

The news cycle moves faster than reputation

A judgement is reached. An investigation concludes. Someone resigns. A new policy is introduced. Eventually the headlines move somewhere else. That doesn’t mean everybody’s perception moves with them. Six months later, the partnership comes up in a board meeting and someone vaguely remembers the story from the time. They probably haven’t followed every development since. Why would they? Their perception may still be based on the point at which the story was at its worst. That’s why managing the immediate crisis isn’t enough.

The relationship needs to keep moving afterwards. Partners need to understand what has changed, what progress has been made and what evidence exists to support that. That can go on for a long time.

Reputation stewardship is part of the deal

There’s something else I’ve come to think about differently as a result of all this. We spend plenty of time defining what good partnership management looks like when things are going well. Rights delivery. Activation. Measurement. Senior engagement. Making sure both sides are getting value. Perhaps reputation stewardship belongs on that list too.

If I’m a brand committing significant money (and some of my own reputation) to a sports organisation, part of what I’d want confidence in is how that organisation will behave when things don’t go to plan.

And, to be fair, if I’m a rights-holder I’d want to understand the same things about the brands I choose to associate with. Because reputational risk genuinely does travel in both directions.

That makes this more than crisis management. And arguably it is something both sides should think about before signing the contract, rather than discovering how the relationship works when something has already gone wrong.

Sometimes the answer is still to walk away

We had brands during that period at the ECB whose agreements were approaching renewal. The wider reputational environment was one of a number of things they had to consider when deciding whether they wanted to continue their relationship with cricket. Some didn’t and I think that’s important to acknowledge.

Good relationship management isn’t about persuading every sponsor to stay regardless of what has happened. It’s about giving both organisations enough information, access and confidence to make a considered decision. Sometimes that decision will still be to leave.

What should you be doing now?

If you manage a significant sports partnership, either as a brand or a rights-holder, I’d spend a little time considering what would happen if tomorrow it became a reputational problem rather than an asset. Make sure you know where the contract sits, who makes the calls, which relationships matter, who needs to be involved and whether there is enough trust between the two organisations to have a genuinely difficult conversation.

Because if you’re trying to establish all of that once the story is already on the front page, you’re starting rather late.

Reputation management doesn’t start when there’s a crisis. It starts when there’s nothing to manage.

Russell James

Founder of Bazballers. Formerly Marketing Director at The FA, Sales and Marketing Director at the ECB, and ten years at P&G.

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