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Balancing Global and Local Objectives
Whether your position sits in your company's headquarters, regional office, local office, or individual business unit, you've probably had some experience of the tensions that can be triggered around ownership, relevance and activation of sponsorship policy.
Given the dynamic tension which exists between the natural centralising impetus of the desire to create a globally coherent brand, and the need for acute culture sensitivity in regional and local activation, friction is almost inevitable.
When a company's global, regional and business-specific sponsorship portfolios are dictated from the main office, the results can only too easily be local and regional employee disempowerment, alienation, or a rigidity of activation which fails to engage consumers in remote markets. In other words, wastage - and damage to brand equity.
So, if you found yourself in a sponsorship decision-making role at headquarters, consider the following:
Regional Empowerment: It really can't be questioned that local personnel know their markets better than it's possible at headquarters. They (should!) know their customers better, be intimately familiar with the competitive landscape, recognize what products selling, and be in tune with local needs, culture, economy and consumer spending. The solution could lie in capability building. Proper sponsorship training allows local markets the autonomy to make the best decisions for their market. It also helps to establish a common language and philosophy within your organisation. Regional empowerment raises awareness - quite rightly - of strategic issues such as brand fit, and allows regions to contribute constructively to issues such as approval mechanisms, local parameters etc
"Think globally, act locally" applies to sponsorship as well as anything. Your customers in Austria, Chile and the U.S. might all enjoy snowboarding for example, but that doesn't mean they all like riding in the halfpipe. Once you've found a global property or a global platform, think of it as an empty canvas. Give local decision makers the flexibility and autonomy (with some controls in place) to paint the picture that appeals to their individual markets.
Internal Consensus: Before buying any global or pan-regional sponsorship, corporate headquarters should request and take every serious input from relevant geographies and business units (or retailers, field sales, etc.) on their interest in the proposed association. Unless a global or pan-regional sponsorship can fulfill objectives for, and be useful to, the entire company, the use and activation of the sponsorship is likely to be undermined. You will especially want to gain buy-in across the company if you require geographies and/or business units to contribute funds to hospitality, promotions or other supporting sponsorship activities within their territory.
Inclusive Environment: Corporate headquarters should make itself a rich resource for sponsorship information, education and training, and guidance. Once or twice annually, sponsorship decision makers from geographies and business units should convene with headquarters personnel for joint planning, sharing of best practices, and training. Such events help to break down adversarial relationships.
