ING Pulling out of Renault sponsorship?

[Scotracer]

Looks so much better with just Renault. Almost 70s/80s style

[xpensive]

I just hope that Alonso takes the pole and walks away with the race. In ING's face.

[sticky667]

aren't ING still the title sponsor of the race?

they haven't completely disappeared from F1. They are still going to honor their race commitments, they only ditched Renault.

[ESPImperium]

Title Sponsor this weekend is SingTel.

[Miguel]

Speaking of livery, the Ferraris would look sooooo much better to me with the flat black front and rear wings of the past.

QFT. I've seen posts with math, with sweet irony or with sheer common sense. But this sentence by giblet is most likely the sentence I agree the most with in the whole F1T forum.

Not too long ago, in January 2006, a certain Michael Schumacher did the shakedown of the Ferrari 248. That car was painted in true rosso corsa and without ads. That day, I felt like a tifoso.

I can't remember the colour of the wings, but I'll try to find the picture.

[bhall]

[modbaraban]

[disregard]

[donskar]

I'm still surprised anyone would view ING's departure as anything other than plain good business on their part.

I struggle to think of more appropriate grounds for a sponsor to end their arrangement early than when a team has acted completely immorally, broken tons of rules, recklessly endangered driver/fans/marshall's lives, not to mention acted unsportsmanlike and basically played everyone in the sport for mugs.

I don't blame them if the first thing in their minds wasn't, Yeah, lets keep giving money to these people who just associated our brand with cheating, lying and underhanded activities.

Speaking from experience (from Compaq's sponsorship of Williams) your comment is right on target.

[Rob W]

ING & MM got more publicity out of this than they could ever have imagined.

Not only the race victory, but then the inquiry into it.

I hope for your sanity you do not actually think people will automatically connect ING to cheating on account of Piquets actions?

Absolutely true, there's no such thing as bad publicity! ING & Renault have got more publicity over Crashgate than they have all season.

Absolutely wrong. It is a throw-away line fallacy that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Ever heard of Exxon Mobil? Union Carbide? Vioxx? Ford Explorer (the roll-over issue cut their sales globally by 25%)? etc etc etc.

I've worked in high-level corporate sponsorship and the larger the institution generally the more conservative they are with it - to the point of being extremely clear about bring them into disrepute. This case is an absolutely perfect example of why they always have clauses to walk when this sort of stuff happens. To think otherwise is just naive.

ING Renault F1 are different to Renault, this saga wont really damage either party's image (Renault & ING) as everyone understands that it was just down to 3 stupid people not a company decision...

No, they don't. 99% of people who read general news media world-wide would associate this with Renault - they wouldn't even be able to name the 3 men involved. Renault's only option really was to jump the gun and be able to at least say "we've cleaned out the bad wood" to mitigate their perceived culpability.

As for ING. No matter how they have conducted themselves in the past year in terms of the financial crisis - I'm no fan of at all - the marketing line they want to put out there depends entirely on being credible, reliable and trustworthy. As is the basic case with all banks. Association to one of the sporting world's most publicised cheating scandals would be very low on their wish list.

[kilcoo316]

Absolutely wrong. It is a throw-away line fallacy that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Ever heard of Exxon Mobil? Union Carbide? Vioxx? Ford Explorer (the roll-over issue cut their sales globally by 25%)? etc etc etc.

Bad publicity is usually related to a specific danger to the general public.

You are way off base equating a sporting incident to people dying or becoming severely ill.


If it is not directly related - people don't care... they just wonder "who are ING?"

I've worked in high-level corporate sponsorship

You can't half tell!


PR "gurus" have a massively over-inflated idea of just how important they are and how they can "engage" people with "synergies", "slogans" etc.


Look at BMW - all this "connect" b*llsh!t. No-one gives 2 f**ks - I'm a bloody engineer with an interest in cars, and I've absolutely no idea what it is.

Or Honda's "earth dreams"...


In order to try and 'justify' their wages - PR are coming up with ever more complex advertising models and strategies that just do not work. But, they dare not say "simple is better", as then the question will be asked "why do we pay you so much then?"

[xpensive]

I've always had this feeling, without the razzmatazz and hospitality suites for sponsor xecutives, interset would be lame.

[Rob W]

Bad publicity is usually related to a specific danger to the general public.

You are way off base equating a sporting incident to people dying or becoming severely ill.

Again, this isn't really the case at all. John Kerry and the swift boat... John McCain being painted as an extension of the Bush admin... Coke changing their "Classic Coke" formula... Morgan Spurlock's 'Supersize Me'... etc the perception of untrustworthiness has a massive impact on people's perception - any specific dancer to the public danger is not the test of bad publicity at all. Guilt by association: being sluggish in explaining ones actions, understating the true importance or significant but obscure details etc (especially in politics) etc are examples of not considering public perception - whether it has merit or not.

Specific danger to the public rarely has anything to do bad PR in the corporate or sporting worlds.

PR "gurus" have a massively over-inflated idea of just how important they are and how they can "engage" people with "synergies", "slogans" etc.

I think idiot and glory-hound type PR people do for sure. Someone who claims to be a PR guru - which I can't recall having seen anywhere - is bound to be a crock.. The same can be said of lawyers and accountants and certainly the bulk of the financial advisers/managers in the world going by the last few year's results. It's nothing special at all.

Most PR types understand perfectly their role and it's limits within whatever industry they work in. The ones who don't are the minority but, to be fair to your point, they possibly cause the bulk of the negative press (ironically) for PR as a whole and so the perception to the average person may be they are *the* industry. They are not.

In order to try and 'justify' their wages - PR are coming up with ever more complex advertising models and strategies that just do not work. But, they dare not say "simple is better", as then the question will be asked "why do we pay you so much then?"

This is basically irrelevant to this discussion - unless you want to display some mistrust of media types. If so it really shows more a dormitive view of modern PR than anything of real merit. Modern PR absolutely aims to simplify things (albeit with often more modern means like social media etc) - connecting a company/brand with the right people in the right method, and at the right time. Simplicity really is a key aim - as it also is in most marketing/advertising. Moreso, PR people never control advertising strategy or planning budget. Advertising (and sometimes media) companies do and are almost always above the PR people in the marketing umbrella.

If the implication was about PR using obfuscation and misleading practices then, like cheating in sport, it will rarely go unnoticed if they keep them up. As in Renault's case it will bite on the ass them eventually.

Put simply. Renault's activities were the perfect reason for ING to walk from the arrangement. People who think otherwise don't understand basic marketing. If you think any PR is good PR - ditto - go read any newspaper and see the proof showing otherwise on an almost daily basis.

Without modern marketing and PR thinking F1 wouldn't exist at all. Nor would America's Cup yachting or many other sporting events. Why? Because somewhere along the line sponsorship stepped from being an almost philanthropic activity to a significant association with the pursuit of excellence which sports hold in most people's minds - be it tennis, F1, boxing or golf. Cheating is the antithesis of this spirit/concept and why Renault have and will suffer from this both publicly and at the corporate level.