Effective sports sponsorship requires a different set of 4Ps

Growing up as the eldest daughter of a sporting mad father in a time of only two TV channels in regional South Australia, I watched a lot of sport. This included the big events: football grand finals, the Ashes cricket series and the Olympics, but also perhaps less conventional programmes like Jack High (lawn bowls), Pot Black (snooker) and a show on Greco-Roman wresting whose name escapes me.

Given this year I get to fulfill a sporting dream and attend the World Cup, and I was recently invited to speak to sponsors of Australia’s greatest sporting invention – the AFL – it’s a good time to talk about sports sponsorship.

These are often costly investments, but there are ways to make the most of any spend.

In the spirit of ironic conformity, here are the 4Ps of effective sports sponsorship: people, passion, prominence and partners.

People

For a brand to grow, its marketing activities need to reach out and build brand memories among the non and very light buyers of the brand. This is hard, given the natural propensity of non-buyers to screen out advertising for brands they don’t buy – making cut through even harder to achieve.

Sporting events are where people of all different sorts come together united in a common cause of the sport, which provides the opportunity to break through the brand lens. If the sport is about team competition, there is the opportunity for cumulative reach, because each week each team faces a different competitor, bringing together a different combination of supporters.

But your brand’s reach can extend beyond the game, when considering all of the other opportunities around sporting events. Some examples include: the press conference, advertising of the game event, player events, highlights shown in news broadcasts or on social media. Understanding who is reached in each of those different environments is a valuable knowledge base to build an effective sports sponsorship.

Passion

Some people are sports mad, like my dad and his beloved Collingwood, others are along for the ride, but it is still easy to get caught up in the passion for competition.

In 2023, the Australian women’s soccer team, the Matildas, broke the record for the most-watched TV programme since the current ratings recording system began. This is because we, as a nation, got caught up in the passion of the game and the fever hit everyone.

But passion is a double-edged sword, and stirring too much passion for the game can mean your brand is ignored or forgotten.

If you are not prominent, your current and future buyers will not even know they have missed you.

It’s easier to make an ad that taps into an already existing passion for a team or a sport, because you are fishing in a shallow pond. Those emotions are easy to surface. It’s harder to get emotion that combines the sport and the brand.

I have spent many a year watching in frustration the big event sports ads, where (interchangeable) brands show different sports stars doing sporty things, occasionally in not so sporty places. I understand the impetus to celebrate the sport and the people who play it, but this should not be at the expense of the brand.

The closest to achieving this combination of brand and sport is McDonald’s ‘Wanna go to McDonald’s?’ for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Yes, it had a couple of celebrities in it, but I would argue these were superfluous and that the campaign would have worked just as well (if not better) without them.

The ad displayed the many emotions of the game but in the context of how McDonald’s is there regardless of how you feel about the outcome. It was also extremely well branded (which definitely gets me emotional).

Read the full article in Marketing Week.