The fight for brand awareness

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Transguard's motives for organising the event were to increase awareness of the brand, which it did through ring-side branding and product placement, but the fighters are also given the opportunity to have their own corporate branding at the event.

"Their nominated boxer could wear their brand in the ring and there was lots of verbal branding from our ring announcer," he explains. "Then there is backdrop branding and banner branding."

But Mamea-Wilson is not convinced that the fighters are in this for the branding opportunities for their companies.

"If you speak to any of them, whatever answer they tell you initially, that is not really the right one or necessarily true," he said.

"Stress levels are pretty high here in Dubai, whether you're a stay-at-home mother or a CEO. It is an awesome outlet to let go of a few frustrations and let go of some stress.

"They say it is for charity or for their companies, but I don't think it is. I think the real reason they do it is to do something that they have never ever done before and will probably never do again. Everybody watches boxing and everybody wishes they were a boxer at some point in their lives; to put the gloves on and go in there without losing face."

Mamea-Wilson said he now planned to take the event to Abu Dhabi and eventually Qatar, but the lack of awareness of White Collar in those markets means attracting the fighters and the audience would be tricky.

He therefore invited some key corporations from Qatar and Abu Dhabi to the recent event, and plans to hold a Dubai versus Abu Dhabi contest in November.

White Collar Boxing

John Mamea-Wilson explains the history of White Collar Boxing.

"White Collar Boxing started at Gleeson's Gym in New York City in 1988.

The gym occupied a bit of prime real estate right in the middle of town, but back then, everyone that came to train at the gym weren't the guys that were paying the rent, so the owners had to come up with a way to keep their facility.

They decided to attract some of the corporates in the area to make some more money and then sold them memberships.

That meant they could keep training their champion fighters (Mike Tyson was trained there) and keep the gym open.

So they sold the corporate memberships on the back of the boxing training.

Then the next step was that the corporates wanted to get into the ring, but they didn't want to become professionals and they didn't even want to fight amateur, so the gym came up with a concept where they can just fight each other and there white collar was born.

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