The Best Kept Secrets in Sponsorship Marketing

It seems as though the idea of using sponsorships as a means to market a company/products is finally hitting Main Street. It is no longer just the beverage and communication, big insurance firms and banks – but smaller businesses are delving into the idea behind sponsorship marketing too.

Madison Avenue has been dabbling in the practice for a few decades, but until recently, measured results from sponsorship were attributed to the "intangible" category. Peer reviewed studies have started to measure its true effectiveness. What we always intuitively knew was working, finally has some research to back it up.

The shift in more use of sponsorship widens the number of new players in the industry who have a lot of questions about various aspects of sponsorship marketing. And since we don’t have a professional organization in the North America to help shape and formalize the practice, some truths and not so truths have crept into the discipline as a result.

We're now a group of “haves and have nots.” Many have noted there seems to be industry "secrets" which have become apparent by the same questions that are asked on many sponsorship listserves. As an example, "what is the REAL value of my sponsorship and how is it derived? Is it done based on impressions, the size of a sign in a venue or something far more reaching" and secretive.

Well, I’m choosing to use this space to bring about these questions that hopefully I can quell or at least put them out there for debate. Each week, I’ll post a new "secret" and perhaps uncover a few from you. Don’t be shy – post your best questions and secrets about sponsorship marketing.

I think we should begin by tackling the biggest secret first – Is sponsorship marketing really all that effective? And, if it is – how do we position its use so that it's effective?

Secret #1: The most effective method of building consumer connections is with Sponsorship Marketing.

In short, unequivocally, sponsorship marketing creates consumer intentions to make a purchase. Not only that, but sponsorship aids in the effectiveness and recall of those seriously expensive Madison Ave. ad campaigns. However, the effectiveness of sponsorships are attributed to:
1) how deep the sponsorship has been accepted by a company internally and
2) how a company chooses to leverage their relationship with sponsored properties.
Bottom line: Sponsorship is effective with internal "buy-in" across the corporate culture and
little buy-in equals little success.

The Sneath, Finney, Close, and Lacey study appearing in the Dec 2006 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research provided the foundation that event marketing serves as a powerful lever to engage the consumer. Consumers that attend community-related activities are more receptive to marketing messages because the experience engages sensory, emotional, relational and cognitive values together. But, these elements cannot be delivered by the property alone. The sponsor needs to engage the consumer using the property as the vehicle to tap into the emotional connection. Too often, company decision-makers want turnkey solutions without having to lift an internal finger which ultimately results in half the partnerships potential.

In an article from the same journal, Measuring the Effectiveness of True Sponsorship, Harvey, Gray and Despain report that what causes persuasion in the sponsorship context appears, however, to be logically different from what causes persuasion in the advertising context. Advertising appears to work by causing improvements directly in brand perception, whereas sponsorship appears to work by causing improvement directly in the perception of the sponsoring company and often indirectly by halo effect in the brand perception. However, even when brand perception is not affected, sponsorship can result in increased purchase intent, apparently as result of gratitude toward the sponsor. So, why wouldn’t a company WANT to take advantage of this across their marketing platform? Because the decision-makers are often too worried about how their latest FSI is going to drive case sales and no one is there to point out that the sponsorship can improve the value of a POS and FSI.

As a profession, it is important that we provide the educational context to help businesses understand that, without their total internal commitment to activating their sponsorship across their marketing platform, it's unlikely they’re going to achieve consumer acceptance. They also need to understand that consumer activism is drastically shifting how purchases are made.

Aligning with consumers through sponsorships is even more important. The ability for companies to capture the hearts of consumers through consumer activism will not be dissuaded by a slower economy. Fact is, companies that utilize sponsorship within their organization and for their audiences will be given the keys to the new kingdom; consumerism with a soul.

Put that in your digital recorder and TiVo it!