Planning for UTMB Week

This year the conversation about the “business side” of UTMB week seems to almost kick off ahead of the stories around the runners. Well, Kilian is confirmed, I guess that’s all we needed to know.

But Matt Trappe highlights a post by Fabrice Perrin on LinkedIn calling brands who aren’t the official sponsors of an event ‘parasitic’ – which I believe he changed the wording since the original post. But the sentiment remains using words to describe the brand’s effort as: ‘toxic, malignant,  opportunistic, dishonest” (mind you, those are all the English words from the auto-translation tool LinkedIn provides).

Matt responds:

You heard it here first but I think the UTMB “ambush” crackdown is coming much harder this year.
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Also, there’s that word again – “parasitic”. It’s been used too often in running lately and it’s not a good look for us.

Fabrice added an addendum to his posts that seems to be backpedaling some of his harsher stances:

I’m not talking about brands present in Chamonix / in a territory that activate adjacent (community runs, pop-ups, useful services, content): this is normal and often positive.

What I’m aiming for is a specific behavior: deliberately creating a confusion of affiliation (“you’re a partner/official”) via wording, visual codes, proximity or “look-alike” installations, or use of protected trademarks/properties.

In other words: adjacent = ok; Ambiguity of affiliation = not ok.

My comment to his initial post:

I understand your point of view from an organizer perspective, but also: fans/visitors love the diversity and effort by many brands offering activations/events and ways to connect and celebrate the sport. The competition is healthy and exciting.

I try to keep an open mind here. Clearly the Winter Olympics were more closely watched by Europeans than our stateside counterparts but some of the learnings from these events seem off to me. I would love to know examples where the general public got confused by the wrongful brand association and how that in turn created a negative side effects – for the public, mind you. Do the event organizers potentially miss out on revenue? Or get contractual push back from their brand partners? Sure, there are ramifications, and I don’t want to discount those. But especially in the example of the Winter Olympics, neither the IOC or any of these global brand partners are in any situation where I would feel the need to jump up and protect their precious brands values they created for themselves.