Social sponsorship has proven to be a relevant tool to express a brand’s values and to add a social dimension to a brand identity. It has the potential to improve brand image, generate better attitudes toward a brand and increase purchase intents. Besides, it is a more powerful lever for brand image than commercial sponsorship.
Using Tech to Empower Decision-Making
How do you know if you’re making the right sponsorship choices? This is a hard question to answer because sponsorship is a complex industry with lots of moving parts. But when you start with the data and use tech to track your progress, it empowers you to make better, more informed decisions.
Insights about Sponsorship Articulation Repetition Effectiveness
Science of Sponsorship Series
Authors: François Carrillat and Alain d'Astous
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an indispensable tool for brands looking to set themselves apart from the competition. Consumers today expect companies to contribute to the collective wellbeing by reducing the environmental impact of their activities and by doing their part to alleviate social problems.
A recent study conducted by the CROP research firm notes how such an approach influences the consumer perception of companies.
For a sports property looking for sponsorship, finding companies that are willing and able to enter into partnerships is no mean feat. But before plunging into a deal, what are some of the considerations the sports property should consider about to ensure success? There are plenty of risks and pitfalls which could harm the property’s prosperity and brand. Taking time to assess risks before making a sponsorship agreement ensures that the property can mitigate some of these potential issues in the planning stage.
Because anything can be sponsored—or almost anything—you’d think that companies would be busy transforming their sponsorship portfolio every time a new trend hit the market. Instead, they tend to focus on their existing partnerships because long-term relationships have a way of paying off.
We are seeing a stabilization of partnerships in the major sponsorship categories, which suggests that brands are adopting a more strategic approach. The average duration of a partnership has also gone up. There is less movement in the marketplace overall, with the exception of brands pulling out during more difficult economic periods.
Within the world of sponsorship marketing, Dr. T. Bettina Cornwell, Professor of Marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist School of Business, is a force of good. A self-professed number cruncher, she applies science and empiricism to keep things real, ensuring objectivity, transparency, and ethics in corporate sponsorship analysis in the areas of sports, arts and charity.
It's only fitting then that someone so principled speak of the ideal of "greatness", as she did in her presentation.
Cornwell believes that many marketers are shooting themselves in the foot—sacrificing greatness—by amassing too many messages and losing focus. "Often times brands have several ideas and audiences and attempt to accomplish too much at the same time. In sponsorship, this can lead to a thin treatment of each component message or worse, confusion," she explains.
While this magazine can’t possibly do justice to all of the insight and effervescence that speakers and participants alike brought to the three-day event, we hope it will give you a little taste of the amazing discoveries we shared during this first edition. Hopefully it will also whet your appetite to join us next year for the opportunity to get even better at what you already do so well.
The success of a sponsorship depends on a number of key ingredients that unfortunately don’t always make it into the mix. The best sponsorship programs are the ones that manage to achieve clear, pre-set objectives, are capable of measuring results and have a strategic vision that stays in focus over time.
O2’s sponsorship program, though not new, remains one of my all-time favourite examples of how to get it right. As well as being incredibly well designed, the winning program developed by this Telefonica-owned mobile company became a core driver of the firm’s corporate marketing strategy. In this case study, we take a look at the context, the program, the strategy and the performance metrics behind O2’s outside-the-box approach to sponsorship.
