An Ice day for a white wedding

A blushing bride bursts through a church gate to be greeted by cameras and well wishers, all pearly teeth, flawless tanned skin and a beaming husband who knows he’s bagged a total hottie. There are a ton of beautiful, famous and even royal friends in attendance and the scene is so picture perfect it looks like an ad for bespoke weddings, or diamonds or . .or .. . Smirnoff Ice???

Image taken from Daily Mail website

To be honest, my first reaction when I saw in the Daily Mail that the lovely Verity Evetts had wed was “Oh great, there’s another gorgeous friend-of-a-friend who has found some lucky chap to make incredibly happy,” but this (slightly self-interested response) was quickly followed by surprise at an odd headline and a picture which showed that she’d stopped off to grab a quick alcopop between the church door and the gate. I like a wedding drink as much as the next person (unless I’m sharing a pew with Lindsay Lohan) and I know a few of the ex-cavalry types at this wedding will have been looking forward to a solid post-nuptial drinking session; but the smart money would have been on champagne greasing the wheels of this social gathering. I mean Smirnoff Ice?? The placement isn’t just odd – it’s bizarre. So what’s the score here?

Well it’s a great tabloid story. The media hooks that makes this a story for the national media are firstly that posh people just don’t drink Smirnoff Ice and secondly that they don’t get their weddings sponsored: it’s tacky and really not the done thing. It may be alright for Anthea Turner to snack on a Curly Wurly as she ties the knot but these aren’t footballers, or reality TV chavs, these are people who are upper class by anybody’s measurement and you’d have thought them well above endorsing any company or product on their special day. But throw in a few celebrities like James Blunt and Ben Fogel and a splash of royalty into this brand mismatch and you’ve got tabloid media gold – and a PR opportunity which will command a high price. Diageo deny involvement, but do we believe them?

What’s the acme of UK brand endorsement? Arguably it’s endorsement by a member of the Royal Family – if you achieve it then you’ve got headlines and a host of positive messages –especially if it’s one of the young royals. The catch – and what makes it so coveted – is that the Royal Family don’t do that sort of thing.

So how do you pull it off? Well one way has to be to get your brand in the same picture and story as a hip royal like Pippa Middleton (who to your average newspaper reader is indistinguishable from a bona fide royal, despite her lack of an HRH honorific). How do you do that? You hand out a bottle of your drink to everyone at a wedding where everyone is too polite to refuse it, or more likely actually in on the joke, and then watch the cameras snap as everyone’s favourite nearly-royal is surrounded by morning-suited toffs merrily swigging pre-mixed vodka-lemonade.

Of course a stunt of this sort will have worked well for the happy couple who have no personal brand to protect, but perhaps less well for Pippa Middleton, businesswoman, style icon and sister to the future queen. One can imagine her feeling less than comfortable and she was savvy enough not to be pictured with a bottle herself, but what damage will this do her name? It rather brings her down to the level of the rest of us – and that is the point, because never has drinking like the smart-set been so affordable. There’s a definite element of ‘Here’s what high society drinks behind closed doors’ which is enhanced by the fact that it’s a notionally private event.

But what could Pippa do about it?

This sort of PR splash takes months of planning, as weddings themselves do. So the betrothed couple would have had plenty of time to warn their guests about what was going to happen and to reassure them that it would be limited to one quick drink in the churchyard and that they’d be able to get back onto the champers at the reception. Forearmed with this information, but determined to attend nonetheless, Pippa knew not to be pictured holding a bottle – but the new face of Waitrose (which may soon see its sales of Smirnoff products rise) couldn’t avoid being pictured next to someone who was. It is surely a reminder to her and the rest of us as to the importance of keeping one’s personal brand clean – Waitrose and Pippa’s own writing and party organising ventures are based on Waitrose customers in particular – and more importantly those in charge of the Waitrose brand – may not see the joke in being linked to the Smirnoff Ice, the get-drunk-quick drink of choice for football WAGS and chavs on a Saturday night out. Lucrative endorsement contracts have been lost for less.

Perhaps Pippa could have headed out through the vestry and made a break for the reception to avoid the cameras, but that’s the trouble with churchyards – not all have back exits . .. to be fair they weren’t laid out with the antics of paparazzi and guerrilla marketers in mind.