No smoke without fire for Dunhill sponsors

Lawrence Donegan, The Guardian, 5 October 2005

A month has passed since tobacco sponsorship of all sporting events was outlawed across the European Union, in which case any television viewers able to divert their attention from the sight of Colin Montgomerie as he won the Dunhill Links Championship might have been fooled into thinking they were witnessing the committing of a bare-faced crime. They would have been mistaken.

It turns out the multitude of hoardings scattered around the Old Course were not advertising the name of one of the world's most recognisable cigarette brands, Dunhill, but Alfred Dunhill Ltd, a luxury goods company founded in 1893 which sells watches, lighters and other trinkets to the upwardly mobile. No crime there then, although pedants might have cause to wonder why, if the tournament was sponsored by Alfred Dunhill Ltd, the hoardings at St Andrews carried only the word Dunhill. Did that not leave open the possibility of some confusion between a company selling pricey lighters and another one selling a product that kills thousands of smokers in this country every year?

"Not at all," said Andrew Wiles, the communications director of Alfred Dunhill Ltd. "If you look at the two company logos our Dunhill has a lower-case d, while Dunhill the cigarette company has a capital D. Also, the cigarette brand uses the colours red and yellow, and we would never use those colours."

Having established the typographical and corporate chasm that separates Alfred Dunhill Ltd from the cigarette brand you might think that would be an end to the confusion. But dig a little deeper and it quickly becomes clear the divide is not so clear after all.

Alfred Dunhill Ltd is owned by a Swiss-based company called Richemont, which also owns a range of other luxury goods companies including Cartier and Mont Blanc. It is hard to establish exactly how well Alfred Dunhill Ltd is performing - its financial data is rolled into that of Richemont - but it is safe to say the company has been going through a rough patch. Sales of luxury goods depend largely on travel and tourism and the Sars scare a couple of years ago hit business badly, leading to the closure of all but one of the Alfred Dunhill shops in the United States.

Fortunately for Montgomerie Richemont will have no trouble honouring its cheques. According to the latest available figures the company made an annual profit of around £400m - three-quarters of which came from its associated tobacco interests; principally an 18% stake in British American Tobacco, the second largest tobacco company in the world and owner of numerous cigarette brands, including - you guessed it - Dunhill.

So what took place at St Andrews last week was not a golf tournament sponsored by a cigarette company but one sponsored by a company selling lighters to smokers, which is owned and heavily cross-subsidised by another company which makes most of its profit from tobacco sales. Confused? Maureen Moore, the chief executive of the anti-smoking group ASH Scotland, is not. "No laws have been broken but what you have here is a classic case of brand stretching. It is not against the law, but it is certainly against the spirit of the law, and the European Tour should do itself a favour and end Dunhill's sponsorship of this event as soon as possible."

Moore might be a non-smoker but not even she will be able to hold her breath long enough for that to happen. The European Tour has a hard enough job finding backers for its events and is not about to sever ties with one of its most generous sponsors any time soon. "The Dunhill Cup was introduced on our schedule in 1985, at which time they made it quite clear they were a luxury goods company, which is what Alfred Dunhill Ltd remains today, both as a company and as a sponsor of the Dunhill Links Championship," said the director of corporate affairs for the tour, Mitchell Platts.