Ambush Marketing: New Moves and Tactics

Summary

How can you protect your brand from an ambush at a sporting event? And, if you’re the ambusher, what are the most effective strategies to employ?

Ambush marketing is practiced by many of the world’s largest brands. But in recent years ambushing has become increasingly complex, taking on several forms, prompting two scholars to reexamine the practice. They called the existing definitions “inadequate in reflecting the complexity of ambush-marketing types.”

Analyzing 850 cases of ambushing, the research team reidentified three types of ambush marketing and offered practical suggestions about each type for event owners, official sponsors, and ambushers.

Describing existing definitions of ambushing as inadequate, the authors redefined the different types as follows:

• Incursive ambushing: “the aggressive, predatory, or invasive activities of a brand that has no official or legal right of association with an event, deliberately intending to threaten, undermine, or distract from an event or another brand’s official event sponsorship”;
• Obtrusive ambushing: “the prominent or undesirably visible marketing activities of a brand that has no official or legal right of association with an event, which may either deliberately or accidentally undermine or distract from an official event sponsorship by another brand”;
• Associative ambushing: “the attempt by a brand that has no official or legal right of association with an event to imply or create an allusion that it has a connection with an event.”