How did Olympic sponsors fare?
A few did well. Coke, for example, executed a fully integrated, scaled, participatory “refreshing rising” campaign that seamlessly fused the brand’s eternal equities with China’s emotional investment in the games. A few other MNC brands – Nike, adidas, UPS – had relevant messages that touched hearts. Many companies’ efforts, however, were unfocused, inconsistent and delinked from the on-the-ground activation required to generate broad scale and directly plug into mass motivations. Local brands in particular fared poorly. Some, such as Anta, Yili and LiNing, were quite aggressive in harnessing the Games’ emotional power, but most threw millions upon millions down the drain with me-too, propagandistic cheerleading. It was no surprise that the Olympics did not represent a positive inflection point in the development of three-dimensional Chinese brands. That said, more and more local companies recognize the link between intangible assets and share price. Furthermore, they know the only way
