Black and white about Open 60s

Till Pohlmann, Hugo Boss’ Head of Sports Sponsorship, tells us why they are into sailing

A lesson to everyone involved at the sharp end of sports sponsorship is that while Alex Thomson may not have the best track record in terms of finishing races, nonetheless he does have one highly content sponsor. And his backer is not small fry, but the German fashion giant, Hugo Boss, which in its fiscal year over 2008-9 saw sales of 1.868 billion Euros. Based from their headquarters in Metzingen, some 30km south of Stuttgart, the company now has 300 of their own stores around the world (set to increase to 400) and more than 1000 franchise stores.

Within the sports sponsorship arena, Hugo Boss are best known for their backing of the McLaren F1 team. Having started in 1981, this is believed to be one of the longest running sponsorships in sport. With McLaren, Hugo Boss have their logos on the drivers helmets, on the car but they also dress the team all the way down to the employees working at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking.

According to Till Pohlmann, Hugo Boss’ Head of Sports Sponsorship, there are three main pillars to their backing of sport: F1, yachting and golf. He won’t put a figure on their annual spend, but estimates just over 40% of this goes on F1, and around 30% on yachting, their second biggest sports sponsorship spend.

In addition to F1 with its huge global reach, they also strongly support their own domestic market in Germany, which still accounts for around 20% of their total sales by among other activities, sponsoring the DTM, the German Touring Car Series. In golf they back individuals playing on the three tours in Europe, the USA and Asia, the best known being Swede Henrik Stenson, as well as three golf competitions: the BMW Open in Munich, the BMW championship at Wentworth and the UBS Open in Hong Kong. In addition Hugo Boss have two minor sponsorships in tennis including the Davis Cup and in football partnerships with Baier Munich and Real Madrid and, soon, another club in Italy. So the whole gamut...

"In all sponsorship have one common demoninator - we dress the teams, the sportsmen functionally as well as business-wise," says Pohlmann. "We use them all for hospitality. We bring every sponsorship into our stores by store events or by POS [point of sale] material and we do events around different sports."

So, what’s the attraction of sailing? Pohlmann says that generally our sport has the obvious associations with being ‘dynamic’, ‘clean’, ‘technical’, ‘innovative’, etc. "But in reality what is interesting about it first of all we are the title sponsor. So it is our branding." So being able to paint their boat black and white, fully in their colours rather than having a few small parts of an F1 car and its driver.



In addition while Alex Thomson and his team set the racing schedule, Hugo Boss have a great say in what happens with the boat and in particular where it goes between races. Thus their Open 60 will be heading for the US this year with hospitality sailing in both New York and Boston.

"What we try to do is to explore this project sports-wise as a team, but everything aside to the sport is ours, where we try to cover globally our markets and use the boat for hospitality, where you can deliver a fantastic experience to press, to celebrities, to customers or to staff with the boat.

"Then you have nice branding all the time [on the boat] wherever you appear. And you can always build an event around that. Wherever we bring the boat we also bring it to our stores with Alex, having him in the store, giving a speech, doing a dinner with him, etc. And most important for us, next to the specialist press - which we are very happy to have it included as well, because of the interesting target audience behind them - is the lifestyle press, which we bring in. We do a photo shoot, etc. This whole package is what makes it really valuable."

Pohlmann confirms that one of the unique aspects of sailing as a corporate hospitality vehicle is that press, VIPs, customers, staff get the opportunity to go for a sail on the race boat with their skipper - something not possible in F1 or other sports. "You can deliver them a once in a lifetime experience that they don’t forget, because it is active. We don’t have people drinking champagne on the boat - at the end maybe - on board they have to work. I don’t wish to devalue Formula 1, but that is passive. To go to a soccer match, you are emotionally involved maybe because it is your team, but you are sitting there - that’s it! On a boat you might not be emotionally involved when you get on, but you get off the boat with a lot of emotions and that’s what we want to create."

Key to this is not only having a very cool-looking boat, but also a personable skipper in Alex Thomson, those painful years working as a flotilla skipper and subsequently as a Clipper Round the World Race skipper finally paying off. "Alex is one of our best ambassadors, because he knows how to deal with the people, how to communicate and involve them in an exciting way and he is a relatively young skipper which is also important for us," says Pohlmann.

One of the other interesting aspects of the Hugo Boss sponsorship, is that like Artemis (read about this in our interview with CEO Mark Tyndell here) their choice of backing sailing is not an emotional one from someone within their board (although their new CEO since 2008, Claus-Dietrich Lahrs, happened previously to be high up in the management of Christian Dior/LVMH, Louis Vuitton of course having strong ties with the America’s Cup).

Pohlmann says that when he started at Hugo Boss in 2002 he wanted to include sailing in their sponsorhip portfolio, although he didn’t receive much support among his colleagues at the time. "I didn’t sail before, it was a case of where can the brand go and especially where our competition hasn’t been beforehand or where it works very well? They showed me Prada. Although that is with a different budget... So I looked at what we could do within our budget possibilities and I wanted to convince my people in the company by doing a small sponsorship and showing them how impressive a boat can look like."

By coincidence this happened to coincide with Alex Thomson having been in contact with Hugo Boss in the UK, putting a proposal to them to back on of his Formula One Farr 65s in the Rolex Fastnet Race in 2003. "I thought that the boat and the crew was not of interest, but to have a fully branded boat to our design and the pictures I needed to convince my board to say 'this is where we should go', but with a different boat with a different crew - at that time I didn’t know the skipper - then that was the main driver. And then we met and we got along." Since then they have acquired the former Sill Open 60 that was lost in the Velux 5 Oceans, built a new Finot-Conq 60 for the last Vendee Globe and most recently acquired the Juan K-designed former Pindar - all branded in Hugo Boss' characteristic black with white trimming.

So why an IMOCA Open 60 campaign rather than America’s Cup or Volvo Ocean Race? "I always have to work with the budget that I have and to explore my budget in the best possible way," says Pohlmann. "The partnership with Alex is the best value for money I can get. It is very simple: if we were part of an America’s Cup team - when it is finally sailing! - that gets far more media attention, which is for sure of interest, but for us it is the package I described beforehand. It is not purely the logo on one boat, especially not if you have a small logo on one of the big boats. So the flexibility we have with this team is for me more valuable than having a logo on one of the America’s Cup boats."

Key to getting value from their Open 60 sponsorship has been working it. "Of course there is a certain interest within the specialist press, but it is not broadcast on every TV station, so you have to deliver programs and you have to deliver stories, but as we are title sponsor and because Alex is a very interesting character, there are quite a lot of stories to tell and the sailing he does it is adventurous, it is not boring, it is not just up and down the coast. Whenever he participates in a race there is a certain risk to his life, which makes it already a story."

Pohlmann cites Thomson's rescue by Mike Golding in the Velux 5 Oceans when his yacht’s keel was in the process of becoming detached from the boat. "For life in general – what a great story! Someone is in danger, a competitor who argued with him beforehand gets the opportunity to save his life and both of them are all of a sudden in another problem and they manage to get themselves back to the shore."

In terms of the value of their sponsorship in yachting, Pohlmann reckons it delivers around three to four times their investment. Compared to Formula 1 or football where TV viewing figures make it much easier to quantify the return, a yacht racing sponsorship is harder to put a value on. "The soft factors are difficult to measure. To bring a customer on board, that maybe decided two weeks ago that he doesn’t want to do business with us anymore, but he takes this opportunity and gets off the boat and says ‘actually, this brand isn’t too bad’ has got a value that you can’t really measure. Or a customer that comes off the boat and says ‘this is the best brand in the world..." This is what I try to deliver to my consumers and it is not countable. This is something I believe when you think about sponsorship it is not purely about 'where is the brand and when can I see the logo and is it on TV and for how long?’ That is for me is a given. Every sponsorship has to deliver a certain media value. But if your target is much more, especially in the soft areas then it is difficult to put a figure behind it."

Of all their sponsorships, Pohlmann reckons the Davis Cup delivers the best return on investment - up to 10 to 1, although he says this assumes it is hosted somewhere where they are interested in tennis. "If the Davis Cup is happening that weekend everyone is watching it, you are on TV, you are in the newspapers, you get an excellent ratio out of this event."

Sailing has unique features such as lengthy events - the Vendee Globe has the potential to go on for three months, for example. However it also has a downside, particularly in the case of the French shorthanded offshore events. "Each sport has different advantages and disadvantages," continues Pohlmann. "Formula 1 is travelling the world and normally into the city centres which is good. Sailing has the disadvantage that it always happens in small cities or villages which are far away from the centres and for us as a brand a city centre is where we exist. For me a race from London to New York would be perfect rather than Les Sables d’Olonne to say a small village in Costa Rica." However he says that is something that they can hold some influence over and it is changing. "The Barcelona World Race is one step in the right direction, but on the other hand you have to make the most out of what you have. So if you are in Le Havre we do have a customer there so we work with them and we bring press and customers in from Paris. So you have to be actively more involved."

Another clever aspect of how Hugo Boss leverage their sponsorship in sailing is by cross-promotion with other sports - getting Lewis Hamilton to do the Round the Island Race or bringing David Coulthard on board during Cowes Week, while Alex in turn gets to go to Grand Prix. One of the best things they did in 2009 after pulling out of the Vendee Globe prematurely was taking the boat up to the British Open golf tournament and sailing around in the background of wherever the TV cameras were pointing (with the aid of a small portable TV set on board). Thomson has also done some magnificent photo shoots with him clad James Bond-like in his sharp-looking black Hugo Boss suit standing on his yacht’s keel fin as it heels over and also on a foiling wake board being towed along behind his yacht.

"Sometimes it is the simple ideas which are the easiest and most effective. And if you have the flexibility with the boat because you can move it wherever you want to you can create the most value." Pohlmann says they have a few other idea up their sleeve.

Since Hugo Boss got involved in sailing, Pohlmann says he has been pleased to see another major German fashion brand get involved in sailing, with Puma backing Ken Read’s team in the Volvo Ocean Race. There have also been rumours of Adidas snooping around the sport. "I was pleased because that proves that there is a certain interest for lifestyle brands – I’m not saying fashion, but lifestyle. Puma is a lifestyle brand as is Adidas. Prada has a certain lifestyle value - I believe there is much more in the sailing industry. If some of the companies explored it a little bit further, they would find possibly a lot more aspects about why they should go into sailing. I would be pleased to see more brands also in this class (the IMOCA 60), more of the biggest lifestyle brands or better known brands, consumer goods brands using this platform, because I can say from our experience it is very excellent value for money."

We couldn’t agree more.