The Lure of Sponsorship Marketing
Category: Blog - April 09, 2008
While online and social marketing continue to explode in popularity and effectiveness with marketers, American consumers still look to legitimize or experience for themselves a product or service before they accept it - something that doesn't always come easy through your PC.
Effective sponsorship marketing programs provide this legitimizing experience to consumers through a simple strategy built around brand interaction. Sponsorship marketing (if done correctly) not only provides a captive audience for companies to reach their audiences, but is also more easily quantifiable than social media, which is still wrestling with best ways of measurement.
North American businesses are expected to spend $16.8 billion sponsoring events in 2008 according to IEG Sponsorship Report - an increase of 12.6 percent from 2007. Millions of these dollars are spent on highly visible, large-scale sports leagues and events with TV rights and contracts (i.e. NASCAR's Sprint Cup and PGA Tour's FedEx Cup), but smaller companies also trying to legitimize their brand have steered toward localized and targeted events that fit even the smallest of budgets.
Today, companies have the opportunity to sponsor just about any organized event that attracts a crowd. From Dance Marathon in State College, Pa., to the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, Maine, there is no shortage of events for companies trying to reach their core customer. The challenging part is deciding how to effectively activate your sponsorship.
It is important to determine what your company is trying to accomplish with its sponsorship. Brand awareness? Prestige? Sales? Competitor differentiation? Once the overall business goal is set, it is important to design a strategic marketing plan to capitalize on the exposure the event will receive with consumers and the media (see Ryan McCarthy's article in Inc. Magazine titled "Blessed Events - How to Make a Sponsorship Pay Off").
A classic mistake I see all the time in NASCAR Sprint Cup is a company that spends $250,000 on a secondary sponsorship to have their 1' x 2' logo placed on the rear panel of the car. What the sponsor fails to realize is that it takes at least another $125,000 to properly activate its sponsorship with hospitality, internal marketing, CSR, driver appearances, etc. The sponsorship may be cool, sexy and build internal morale, but it takes more than writing a check and approving your logo. Companies that do not properly activate these elements often only stick around for one to two seasons. And I can't help but think about how sponsoring twenty smaller events across the country would have given the company a better ROI than one secondary NASCAR Sprint Cup sponsorship.
In the age of social marketing and digital advertising, cutting through the clutter with an event sponsorship can be a beneficial, cost effective, low-tech way to build your brand...but again if done correctly and with the right type of experience or support.
Matt Hansen
Account Supervisor
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