Elliott West
“I think it is also up to the players to help liven up snooker’s image and raise its profile, and I feel good to do my bit with the help of HP”.
Jimmy White
Introduction
The year was 2005 and the snooker calendar arrived at the Masters. What followed was bizarre to anyone outside snooker but made sense in marketing terms. James Warren White or Jimmy White as we know him, was about to go one step further than the usual branding of commercial backers in sport and actually change his name to James Brown, to highlight that HP Sauce was sponsoring aspects of the Masters at Wembley that year. A renaming that would last the course of the Masters and possibly up to the World Championship.
A Stroke of Genius
The deed itself took minutes with Jimmy just having to pay £39 to change his name via the deed poll procedure and actually created a small windfall for the Labour government of the time and brought about the next day when an additional £20 was paid for an express service to guarantee the deed was done by 9 am the following day. This marketing ploy didn’t stop there with not only the brown ball being sponsored by the sauce manufacturer but White or Brown as he was now called, swapping his usual black dinner jacket for a brown one. A spectacle that Jimmy at promised to result in his assumed name being engraved as the winner on the trophy. A promotion that helped to be put in motion by his good friend and snooker colleague, Paul Hunter.
Despite this stroke of marketing genius, there was a hidden clause within this scheme. What wasn’t revealed was that Jimmy White would only officially become James Brown if he used the deed poll to get his documents and records changed including his driving license and passport. It worked though and attracted a lot of additional revenue for a sport that was going through a lean period and was a win, win situation for the branded sauce, snooker and Jimmy White himself.
A Happy Ending
With headlines like ‘ Jimmy bottles it”, the media was alight with quirky headlines to give to this punchy story, a refreshing alternative to the doom and gloom that is usually spread across the tabloids and broadsheets. A great coo for HP Foods who had cheekily asked Jimmy when they knew they had secured the sponsorship of the Masters’ brown ball and a phone call that he initially thought was a joke. A saucy tale nearly came to an abrupt end after the BBC attempted to block the deal but a threat of legal action stopped the television company dead in its tracks.
