Brand experience or corporate turn-off?

Brands need to prioritise consumer insight to unlock the true potential of sponsorship

Sponsorship is now recognised as a key tool for many marketers for two principal reasons.

The first is that media fragmentation and clutter is shifting the focus from channels to platforms in order to reach critical mass. Best-practice sponsorship takes a powerful platform and integrates and leverages it through the line to create a multi-channel campaign which addresses multiple objectives such as raising awareness, building the brand through brand transfer, and facilitating sales.

The second is sponsorship’s unique ability to add value to people’s consumption of their interests and passions, and through this build relationships based on positive brand encounters. With brand cynicism growing, and CRM moving centre stage, you would think this would make sponsorship the Holy Grail for marketers. Yet if we are honest for a moment, and at the risk of observing that the sponsorship emperor isn’t as fully dressed as many claim, can we ask how many sponsorships have really connected with consumers? And is there not a growing risk of a backlash to sponsorship in general through inappropriate intrusion into what consumers hold so dear?

We believe that If sponsorship is to fully embrace its great potential and avoid becoming a word synonymous with corporate interference, brands must put consumer insight at the heart of their sponsorship strategy, and not simply use it to add yet another layer of clutter to consumers’ brand-saturated lives. The only way brands can do this is by truly understanding consumers, how they interact with the sponsored property, and therefore how they should build their activity.

The problem is that, at best, most sponsor properties are only assessed and bought in terms of potential reach and fit with the sponsor’s target audience demographic. This isn’t helped by the limited understanding rights owners have of their own audience, or the fact that there is little independent, brand literate advice available.

Investing in understanding the property’s fans and how they would respond to the sponsorship invariably reveals enormous insight which will inform not just what to sponsor, but how to sponsor. Without such insight, a brand is unlikely to form any connection and risks a serious backlash from the audience it is trying to woo if it gets its sponsorship wrong.

Consider golf, whose affluent followers are a key target audience for a host of brands. Anyone who’s attended a major golf event will know that (unless you’re in the comfort of a hospitality marquee overlooking the 18th green) actually watching the golf isn’t easy. You have to walk for miles. Food and drink is average and expensive. Ditto the merchandise. It’s difficult to find out what’s going on. Finding a good vantage point is incredibly difficult. And so on. Yet how many golf sponsorships exploit this key insight, and do something about it?

At the last Ryder Cup for example, the branded banner boards around the tees were so tall that they almost totally obscured the thing that the 105,000 fans who attended wanted to see – the action. Unless you were seven feet tall, all you could see was the players’ heads and shoulders, let alone the club they’d chosen. The sponsors’ logos may have been seen by the viewers at home, but what did it say about them? Maybe the only clear sponsor message communicated was that taken away by the frustrated fans and then shared with their friends and families?

Will fans be queuing overnight next summer to see a major event such as Wimbledon and then witness the empty seats as sponsor’s guests are still sipping champagne in the hospitality area? And will Euro 2004 produce millions of dollars of negative PR for sponsors as stories of their tickets being sold on the black market reach the UK?

Fortunately some brands do get it right, and reap the rewards of a closer relationship with their consumers leading to greater sales etc. Arguably the drinks category is leading the way, possibly thanks to a more natural fit? Coca Cola has placed fans at the heart of their football strategy for several years, and Guinness and Carling have succeeded in earning the respect of rugby and football fans through adding value to their experience of their sport, with the result that their sponsorships have proved effective investments for their companies.

The crucial point here is that just being there – as a sponsor - is not enough. The fans haven’t paid their hard earned for the ‘privilege’ of seeing sponsor messages. They’re there for an experience, a celebration, the chance to say ‘I was there’. Savvy sponsors acknowledge this and focus on an engagement based on adding something to the fan experience. The better these brand encounters are, the greater the return on investment, because the result is heartshare – far more valuable than the fleeting mindshare delivered by conventional interruptive marketing and, if we’re honest, most sponsorships today.

Billions of pounds are spent globally on sponsorship, yet how many sponsors can honestly say that they have done their due diligence in understanding the needs and interests of their target audiences? How many, hand on heart, can say that they there were as sure as they could possibly be that their actions were adding value to the consumers’ experience and ultimately altering their brand perceptions for the good?

As each marketing activity come sunder increased scrutiny for its return on investment, we believe that consumer insight will have to become a key driver for sponsorship decisions, and only then will sponsorship’s unique potential to connect with consumers be realised.

Matthew Osmon and Tim Crow