Ambush Marketing - An Effective Marketing Technique or Just a Worthless Fad!

A Look Into the Effectiveness of Ambush Marketing

Ambush marketing is a marketing technique where a company associates its brand to a sporting event without paying any sponsorship fee (Skildum-Reid, 2007). In other words, the company which is involved in ambush marketing is not an official sponsor of the event; however, it places its advertisements on the event at prominent places so the spectators are bound to pay attention to these advertisements. Thus, the company actually takes benefit of the publicity and the reputation of a particular event by making an association with it, without paying the due sponsorship fee (Simon and Nicholas, 2010).

Effectiveness of Ambush Marketing

Ambush marketing is a direct and effective marketing technique because it places the marketing material in front of a large crowd in a major event and the crowd is bound to pay attention to it. From a corporate perspective, ambush marketing is one of the most enforcing ways through which any newly launched product or brand can be advertised and managed at the same time but with its own pros and cons (Meenaghan, 1996).

Effective marketing is the way of choosing various different marketing channels which are currently available in the most effective manner for executing their marketing plan since it is the most important aspect that comes into play. When conducting a marketing plan for a particular product, it is the first and foremost priority to identify the different channels that can be used or are contemporarily used for successful and efficient marketing campaigns. Ambush marketing is effective because it compels a large number of people to pay attention to the marketing material of a brand or product.

With the increasing level of competitiveness that is gaining phenomenal pace, it has become increasingly important to market products through the exploration of greater frontiers and channels. Since the target audience of many products are highly scattered and are not bound to any specific area or demographic unit, all kinds of marketing channels whether it be through print means of using newspapers or through electronic means where television and radio, are utilized for marketing the product by making use of diverse dimensions.

Some people think that ambush marketing is just another fad of marketing gurus, but well, this is not quite true. Ambush marketing is a guerilla and direct technique to get attention of thousands of customers without spending much. For example, Nike has used the recent FIFA world cup event for ambush marketing; and according to the consumers from UK, US and other European countries, Nike has benefitted from their ambush marketing technique more than any other company without being the official sponsor of the event.

Moreover, some people are of the view that ambush marketing is a highly unethical marketing practice. In their opinion, the sponsor pays millions of dollars while the ambush marketers or ambushers for that matter; just get the benefit of the event without paying their due share. On the contrary, people who are in favor of ambush marketing opine that it is the legitimate and legal right of the companies to find the most cost effective ways of marketing their brands, products or services; therefore,  ambush marketing is nothing but a very cost effective and highly efficient marketing technique (O'Sullivan & Murphy, 1998).

Conclusion

In the end, it can be concluded that apart from the debate of ethical and moral justification of ambush marketing, it is still a very effective direct marketing technique to get the attention of a large number of people without spending much on the overall marketing campaign.

References

Meenaghan, Tony, 1996, Ambush Marketing: A Threat to Corporate Sponsorship, Sloan

Management Review, 38(1), pp. 103 – 113, Print.

O'Sullivan, Paul & Murphy, Patrick, 1998, Ambush marketing: The ethical issues, Psychology

and Marketing, 15 (4), pp. 349 – 366, Print.

Simon Chadwick and Nicholas Burton, 2010 October 20, New Definitions for Ambush

Marketing, The Wall Street Journal, Print.

Skildum-Reid, Kim, 2007, The Ambush Marketing Toolkit, McGraw-Hill, Print.

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