sammsky1

Not really.

Lets take the UK market context as an example:

AIG was pretty much an unknown consumer entity in the UK before they were thrust onto our shirts ... Im quite well versed on consumerism and I had never heard of them!

Anyway, in UK banking, a company like Barclays or RBS will spend around £100m per annum on marketing investments. Bear in mind that that figure is on top of the brand equity build upon decades of similar investment. So, just to get ones name registered and linked to Insurance in the UK would have cost several times of what existing brands invest... the rule for a new brand is that they normally have to invest say 3 times what established brands already do ... assuming they are using like for like media channels. For the record, something like Persil Washing Powder invests in excess of £50m a year in the UK and brands like Coke and Microsoft even more.

So, for a company like AIG who as I said, I will assume was pretty much unheard of outside of the US prior to the United sponsorship, I thought the sponsorship was a masterstroke for them as it bought them mass global brand recognition and delivered it within a year. YOu just could not buy that kind of coverage with the money that they invested with us if you tried to do it through buying a TV campaign for example.

The mistake that they subsequently made in my opinion was then not taking that brand recognition that they had generated and converted that into any meaningful consumer engagement. When I travel around India, China or Europe, I dont see AIG anywhere. And so I would imagine that there are lots of consumers in those markets who can read AIG but who still know nothing about the company. Much like many people do not know what the company bwin offers.

For AIG to sponsor Manchester United, it only made sense if they were targeting a non US based customer base. And yet outside the US, they did almost nothing in terms of marketing over and above the United deal. In summary, I still cant work out what they achieved.