Who do these work in the UK? My understanding is that a business is granted a Royal Warrant which says that a member of the royal family uses their product.
Are the warrants granted to the manufacturers or the retailers or both? Is it an exclusive arrangement or can the Queen decide she wants to sample other brands? Does the royal family actually buy the products or are they supplied for free in exchange for patriotism and prestige? If I make some product can I send samples in hopes of being issued a royal warrant or are you supposed to wait quietly to be chosen?
Wikipedia and the Buckingham Palace website have pages on this. The most important thing first: It actually is a bona fide commercial relationship, not just payola; the Queen (or the other royal who grant such warrants of appointment - in addition to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales do so too) actually purchases these products, or has them purchased by the staff running their households. They don’t necessarily have to be consumed personally by the grantor of the warrant; they can also be bought for entertaining guests, or to pass on as gifts (Wikipedia mentions the example of cigarettes, for which the issuance of warrants has meanwhile been discontinued). The goods are not provided for free, they are actually bought by the royal households, though I suppose bulk discounts are available if large quantities are purchased. It’s not exclusive; the granting of a warrant leaves the royal household free to buy from competitors, but the warrant would not have been granted if there weren’t already a history of regular purchases of this particular product.
Maybe I’m missing something but this seems to me to be the equivalent of a celebrity endorsement: “Buy our product because somebody famous likes it.”
I can understand how the businesses like this. But it seems more like something a movie star or an athlete would do. You’d think the royal family would feel it’s beneath them.
And most celebrities are getting paid to endorse products. Why is the Queen of England doing it for free?
Very much this. The British royals have been granting royal warrants to their favored suppliers since the Middle Ages; there are individual firms on the current list who have been warrant holders for more than two centuries. (Example: Berry Bros. and Rudd are wine and spirit merchants to the Queen; they were also suppliers to the Queen’s great-great-great-great-grandfather George III, and to most if not all of the generations in between.) From the Queen’s perspective, why should she give up doing something merely because new upstarts are now doing it too?
Some German companies still advertise with warrants granted them by pre-WWI German royalty. Apparently, the alcohol industry is particularly prone to that, since I’ve seen it, in particular, in case of breweries - an example is Radeberger (known in America mostly for its product placement in Two and a Half Men), which still likes to mention its royal warrant awarded by the King of Saxony.
I wonder how that is regulated legally nowadays: Can you just keep using this warrant forever, since the royalty which awarded it is not around anymore to revoke it in case your quality standards drop? My suspicion is that at best, misleading advertising laws would be in place to prevent that, and that it wouldn not be considered misleading if your company actually was awarded the warrant while the monarchy was still in place.
A related phenomenon, at least here in the US, its spirits (and some other products) with labels that boast of a prize at some competition or show that may have happened over a hundred years ago. Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, for example, has a mark on its label boasting that it won at the Paris International Exposition in 1900, and I’ve seen bottles of liquor that boast about winning a contest in, say, Constantinople in the 1860s.
I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that if the manufacturer is making a statement of fact that this product did in fact receive that honor at that time, then they’re not doing anything wrong by promoting it regardless of how long ago it actually happened, any more so than the Chicago Cubs still get to brag about winning the 1908 World Series.
We have the same phenomenon in Europe, and sometimes companies simply invent fake traditions. An example - again from the booze industry - is a Russian brand of vodka named Russian Standard. Their advertising speaks of a history dating back to Mendeleev (of periodic table fame), which is completely made up. It’s worded carefully enough to be be legally sound, I suppose, but it certainly insinuates a tradition much older than their product really is.
You wait quietly to become a regular supplier - although I think if you do become a regular supplier, you need to apply for a warrant. It doesn’t just appear one day as a prize.
Anecdote. My father was ‘this’ close to getting a Royal Warrant years ago - he made riding clothes worn by Prince Charles. The reason he didn’t was because you have to consistently supply the Royal in question for five years, and Charles fell off his polo pony and stopped riding for a while - which meant the clock reset on Dad’s warrant bid, and Charles never bought regularly enough once he got back on his horse.
It was gutting for my Dad as his biggest markets were Japan, the Middle East and USA, where customers LOVED that stuff. Dad compensated by sticking a Union Jack on his clothing labels.
He wasn’t a royalist and saw it purely in commercial terms.
I think the point there is to prove that they’ve been a high quality product for a long time, although I’d think the point would be better proven by showing a pattern of awards over time, rather than a few in the distant past.
My favorite is when companies advertise wins in competitions where they’re only competing with their similar lame peers.
For example, Coors might advertise a medal in the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) for the American Style Light Lager category, when for the longest time, they and their other megabrew peers were the only entrants. (only in the past 4-5 years have non-megabrews started winning medals in that category).
For example, in 2007, Old Milwaukee Light won the Gold Medal in that category, with Pabst Blue Ribbon winning Silver, and Coors Light winning Bronze. Woo! They really proved their beer is awesome there.
Shows how much TV I watch. I had no idea you could get that beer here, or that the brewery would bother to get product placement on an American TV show.
Radeberger Pils is delicious. Thought I’m probably biased because I was drinking it on vacation, where everything tastes better.
You can’t do that with English royal warrants. I suspect that the only reason the Germans get away with it is that there is no post-WWI German royalty to object.