As the next phase of Aon’s Manchester United sponsorship begins, Maxine-Laurie Marshall sits down with the company’s global CMO, Phil Clement, to look at its impact on the brand
If your job moves to a different country, would you go with it or wave it goodbye? Phil Clement, global CMO of Aon, found the decision pretty easy when he found out he’d have to move to London when Aon’s headquarters moved there: “Of course I wanted to move with it, a chance to live in London and focus on the global footprint of our company, which does business in 120 countries and to be able to see it from a different vantage point was too good to miss.”
As well as embracing the move from Chicago to London wholeheartedly in a professional capacity, he’s settled in very well personally, telling me his Sunday mornings are now spent reading the FT and gardening, while his sons have embraced rugby and are teaching their contemporaries a thing or two about basketball.
Sponsorship
However, it’s a different sport Aon has chosen to associate itself with. If you’re a football fan, or live in the same house as someone who is, chances are you’ll recognise the Aon logo. The insurance broker and provider of risk management services has been the shirt sponsor and partner of Manchester United since
2010. The contract finished at the end of the last season. So, after four years of high-profile global brand exposure, were its objectives met?
Clement explains, before looking at sponsorship, Aon knew it wanted a brand that made it easy for clients to choose it and engendered a desire to work there. It needed to differentiate itself in the market, and at the time it could only do that on size and that wasn’t felt to be very compelling. Sponsorship then became an option against other plans as, despite the large cost associated with such high-profile activity, Clement tells me it was more cost effective: “You can imagine what it would cost if you were to hire five people in each 120 countries and give each of them five million in advertising budget. The likelihood of actually moving your brand might be minimal. Ten million pounds in the London market disappears pretty quickly as an advertising budget. By contrast, we started to evaluate the Manchester United proposition. Instead of hiring teams across the world, I could have a really lean team in the middle to then distribute the activity globally. So it was a cost efficient way to do what we wanted to do.”
Brand awareness
With the wider strategy of making the brand more desirable to do business with and work for, the sponsorship also had three objectives to meet: unite the firm, improve brand awareness and boost client engagement. Brand activity is often difficult to measure but Clement uses a methodology called return on objectives, where he took a portion of the fee and put it against each objective and decided what metrics to use to show value. For example, brand surveys.
Clement says: “People recognise our logo but now we’re at a stage where we have to get people to understand what we do.” Aon has now signed a seven-year deal with Manchester United and the aim is to address that issue. Clement plans to leverage its association with the club meaning it’s no longer necessary to have the most expensive part of the sponsorship: the match-day shirt. But now Aon will align itself with six key topics: risk, talent, health, data and analytics, access to capital and retirement. This is being achieved by activity such as sponsoring the training complex, getting players more involved in issues around health and as Clement says: “Generally throwing yourselves into conversations that people are paying attention to on the topic you want people to know that you’re involved in. For example, if we want to talk about retirement Alex Ferguson retiring from Manchester United was one of the biggest stories in the world.”
Hands on
A sponsorship of this magnitude would come with a considerable price tag. However, it’s reassuring to hear Clement say as a CMO it’s his responsibility not to get hung up on asking for budget. “Having a CMO title people often ask me: ‘how do you argue for a bigger budget?’ You’re job isn’t to get budget, because if you get it, somebody else with a ‘C’ in front of their name doesn’t. As a CMO, you have to know when it’s more important for those resources to go to different parts of the business.”
Another surprising revelation came after I asked if he gets to do much ‘doing’ as a global CMO. Clement jokes and says: CMO skill sets are knowing how to print name badges and sort seating arrangements in restaurants. Clearly not afraid of getting involved in the everyday logistical aspects of the job, he says: “Little things matter at events, you always have to be willing to pitch in. When the strategy’s been defined you’re just another pair of hands.”
Knowing how to pitch in and earn respect is something Clement seems to do naturally. When he took the job, he had no delusions of grandeur: “Because you’re CMO, doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen to you. The notion that any authority comes with a title or a position is fairly empty. People will gravitate to and execute good ideas. If they’re not listening, there’s something wrong in either the idea or how you’re translating it for them.”
This is a lesson that can be extended to every business function. But keeping the focus on marketing, it can be too easy to complain about budget and that the business isn’t listening. However, heeding Clement’s advise by proving your worth and making sure you look to yourselves before attributing blame, can go a long way.
Lessons for a CMO
Clement offers three lessons for CMOs
1. Work for people you can learn from. Greg Case, Aon’s CEO, was someone I thought I could learn from, he’s a wonderful professional mentor, and he was a big draw in me coming to work for Aon.
2. You can’t come in thinking people are going to listen to you and change what they’re doing because you, the CMO, says so. The notion that any authority comes with a title or a position is fairly empty.
3. Don’t aspire to being a leader, it’s putting the end before the mean. Aspire to helping your colleagues and learning your profession. Aspire to being in a room with 10 people and knowing that they are more successful now than when you weren’t there. Aspire to giving away credit, not taking it. Sometimes that seems odd, you feel you’re supposed to be grabbing roles where you have high visibility and you get credit for what you do, but that’s a really short-term strategy and everyone sees it for what it’s worth. The alternative: if you really focus on those values you might get the chance to be in a leadership role and if you are put in that role you’re probably going to have a lot of impact.
