The 2023 Rugby World Cup in France: empathetic sports sponsorships

Last year’s Rugby World Cup saw brands leveraging sponsorship opportunities, with most sticking to traditional themes. However, Volvic's campaign featuring Antoine Dupont in a nature setting, emphasizing personal connection and values, stood out, highlighting a potential shift towards more empathetic and meaningful sports advertising.

The sports sector provides an interesting lens to evaluate if a brand adopts traditional codes and representations (e.g. for rugby - emphasising team spirit, collectivism, family role models) or features an individual personality in an unexpected space with symbolic meaning.

The 2023 Rugby World Cup in France generated record spectator and TV viewership (65% of French people watched at least one match). While South Africa won their 4th title and France disappointingly lost in the quarterfinals, the event offered brands creative opportunities to showcase values and heroes.

Ipsos’ “Advertising Try Scorers” awards recognise the most impactful sponsorship campaigns. Playing on rugby analogies, TotalEnergies’ ad (“We’ll only succeed in the energy transition all together”) won top visibility by emphasising team spirit. Andros also focused on an intergenerational, complicit family gathering over rugby and mealtimes. Société Générale won top buzz by featuring solidarity and collective effort.

Creating an unexpected personality pairing allowed Volvic’s campaign with rugby captain Antoine Dupont to win top image association and 2nd in visibility, proximity, memorability and relevance. It broke conventions by showing Dupont running through a forest, arriving on a mountain prairie with painted rugby pitch lines, scoring a try, then drinking mineral water with a triumphant soundtrack. His quote, “I’ve played in the biggest stadiums but there’s no pitch more reenergising than nature” reinforced the link.

While most brands stay faithful to traditional representations or cast players in humorous stunts - like French football players struggling to ask, “So when are YOU switching to Sosh?” (November 2022 - Sosh is a low-cost telco operator), or burglars clashing with rugby players to promote Homiris alarm systems (2023) – very few risk genuine creative ruptures with meaning.

Yet our analysis of 1,700 global ad campaigns shows that displaying empathy towards consumers significantly boosts sales, over simply being entertaining or original but unrelated content – an insight for brands targeting new audiences.

In summary, familiar World Cup advertising tropes still dominate over new semiotic codes, though standout examples like Volvic’s nature-infused player partnership indicate some appetite for branding introspection rather than just capitalising on screen time during a receptive moment. As shifting consumer expectations demand brands resonate at a deeper level, more marketers may take the risk of moving away from superficial sports sponsorship to campaigns rooted in shared values.