Honda - challenging evaluation

Although Honda’s impulse to sponsor the team was entirely intuitive, it certainly ticked many boxes.

Aerial acrobatics can be highly spectacular, and the team excelled as a visual representation of The Power of Dreams. The small team brought with it a sizeable established audience at the UK’s major airshows where the nature of the display was generally a show-stopper. The team additionally brought the flexibility to modify their show calendar around Honda’s needs, offering relevant local opportunities to its dealers.

Rechristened as the Honda Dream Team and with new uniform and branding, the team successfully captivated audiences at airshows, public events,Honda sponsored events, and staff days. Participation in a number of TV productions and the Trafalgar 200 Celebrations delivered valuable incremental exposure.

But the lack of any activation budget raised concerns about opportunities being missed. One large air display with local Honda dealer support resulted in proven sales, but in general the dealer network failed to embrace the opportunity. So, overall the sponsorship was met with mixed feelings – huge excitement over its potential, and frustration that this potential was not being met.

With the next financial year looming and uncertainty surrounding the decision to continue the partnership, we developed an evaluation programme.

Given the impromptu advent of the sponsorship, clear and measurable objectives had to be established before an evaluation programme could be designed. These included, specifically, raising awareness of product range with a younger audience, and increasing excitement and demonstrating the relevance of the brand.

The evaluation programme identified a set of Key Performance Indicators and specific diagnostic measures to evaluate the objectives. Research was conducted pre and post event and the following factors were considered to isolate the sponsorship effect: Degree of awareness and exposure to sponsorship, brand familiarity, age and gender.

The results were very clear: the air-shows were enabling Honda to reach a younger demographic, but the sponsorship activity was doing little to raise awareness of product range. Worse still, Honda was failing to communicate its relevance to the lifestyle of audiences - and the excitement generated by the air display was not transferring to the brand.

The sponsorship vehicle was proven to have potential to deliver against objectives, but was failing for a number of reasons: lack of activation budget, lack of involvement of the dealership network, lack of internal resource and, ultimately, the struggle to connect the planes in the sky to the cars on the ground.

The evaluation raised a clear strategic issue to Honda: commit more heavily to The Honda Dream Team to ensure appropriate activation and buy-in, or withdraw; and Honda chose to withdraw. We were sorry to part company with The Honda Dream Team, but Honda’s decision was based on clear insight and, as such, definitive and beyond emotive discussion.