The brands that succeed at on-pack sporting activations all have one thing in common:
They look the same coming out as they did going in.
This sounds simple enough, but in practice, it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to get right.
When a major sporting event arrives, the pressure builds very quickly. Stakeholders, retailers and agencies all want to push the creative in a particular direction, and somewhere in that process, the brand system starts to bend.
Whether it's colours shifting to match the event palette or typography getting replaced by campaign fonts, the pack gets so covered in occasion graphics that the distinctive assets that consumers actually use to recognise the brand get buried.
However, the brands that consistently get activation right treat their brand assets as non-negotiable before the brief is even written.
To succeed, every creative decision must be made within that boundary, not beyond it.