Textbook PR

Wednesday ABN AMRO announced that they won’t participate in the next Volvo Ocean Race due to the fact that they had achieved all their commercial and sporting goals for the sponsor project. That’s unfortunate for VOR, but both ABN AMRO and VOR had to stop the rumours about the team’s possible next involvement in the race early. Good PR move.

But it gets better. A few hours after the ABN AMRO release, VOR sends out their new newsletter. With the kind of attention their web site has, I would guess that the number of receivers of the newsletter is substantial.

Here they make sure we don’t forget the positive spin VOR has gotten three years before the start with two official entries already: Ericsson and Peter de Ridder.

They also announce that they “also have 10 confidential preliminary entries who have paid their preliminary entry fee of GBP1,500, and there is interest from a number of other syndicates.”

This is good proactive PR, but they should have put the news out on their website to.

The next step would be to get an in depth interview with ABN AMRO head executive on the decision and the business rationale behind it. Because there are a lot of other global companies out there that are in the same position as ABN AMRO was when they took the decision to enter four years ago.