A really nice piece of Wimbledon coverage from Kevin Eason at The Times: "[Andy] Murray was swigging from a bottle provided by Highland Spring, a sponsor reckoned to pay around £1 million-a-year to keep the Murray tonsils lubricated. But that is Verboten here at Wimbledon because it has its own sponsor, Evian, who pay an awful lot more for the privilege of being the only H20 provider on site. So Murray was instructed to tear the label from his illegal bottle so we poor saps in the crowd would not be led down the paths of watery unrighteousness in the thirst department." The story ties in nicely with a working paper we have just published here at CIBS entitled: 'A Typology of Ambush Marketing: The Methods and Strategies of Ambushing in Sport' http://www.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/d/755
Did Murray deliberately or accidentally ambush Evian (did he actually ambush or was he just complicit)? If deliberate, what might be the the implications of his actions? What should the implications of his actions? Should tournament officials impose sanctions on him? Or would this be complete madness? Did Highland Spring ask Murray to do what he did? What should be done if they did? What if they applied pressure on him? Given that Murray tore the label off his water, isn't it 'story over'? Or is it a case of objective achieved (although the label came off, the story has drawn attention to Highland Spring)? And should any of this matter? Hasn't sponsorship gone mad, and aren't ambushers simply providing unnecessary further corporate distraction from the central attraction - the sport?
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