When sponsorships attack

After the Renault F1 cheating scandal, ING has had no choice but to end its association with the team, which it has managed to do commendably quickly.

There is always a question mark over the value brands actually get from sponsorships and similar partnerships - a lot of marketing managers see it as an opportunity to get 'money can't buy' tickets to keep key clients sweet, but too often they are just handed out to anyone who wants to go with no thought to long term relationship building. My fiance has a story of working for a bank a couple of decades ago, where the company had sponsored some terribly high brow acting troupe - he had to bribe clients to come with cheaper loan deals. Hardly value for money.

But ING has bigger problems than making the sponsorship deliver measurable benefits, as big a challenge as that always is. It has probably had more publicity from withdrawing from the deal than it would have had had the relationship continue. What is the impact of that publicity?

At a time when bank expenditure is being scrutinised and bankers' ability to make good decisions is being questioned, people will be looking at the due diligence aroundinto the type of people banks jump into bed with. Also, unless ING had negotiated a watertight integrity clause into the contract, they will have had to write off a chunk of sponsorship money - but will have lost the benefits they were expecting. They may also now have disappointed clients with F1 tickets they can no longer use.

As financial services marketers we need to ask harder questions of the companies we allow to share our brands. Now more than ever, our customers are looking for transparency, for reassurance that we are looking beyond the brand to the detail and the personalities underneath when assessing the risk of the partnerships we choose. That goes as much for sponsorship contracts as for third party product offers such as the Lehman, AIG, Kaupthing etc deals that rattled our customers' confidence in us a year ago.

We can't just rely on the legal and compliance departments to check the contracts we sign. Ultimately, the integrity of our brands is our responsibility.  ING has done the hard job of breaking the contract - now it needs to examine the lessons it has learned from this to work out what it could have done to avoid the situation arising in the first place.

Had it done enough to impress on Renault the need to protect the integrity of both brands? Were the consequences of a reputational scandal sufficiently onerous? What did they do to examine the moral compass of the team bosses?