Sponsorships are one of the situations in marketing when you rest the success of your strategy on something outside the firm and outside your direct control. If you manage these relationships like your traditional resources, your risk of failure goes through the roof.
Have you had any experiences like this? Please share them below.
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Richard’s research focuses on creating effective marketing strategy and valuable brands, such as sponsorship and its use in marketing strategy.
It depends on why you're entering the sponsorship. Do you have a product or service that you want the players to be seen personally endorsing? If so, and they go off the rails, then yes, it might have an adverse impact. But if your connection with the club is more about broad exposure to the masses (e.g. a simple sign on a jumper) or narrow exposure to club members or other stakeholders, then bad behaviour by players may have no impact at all. It can actually be on-field, as opposed to off-field, performance that can have the biggest impact on the success or failure of a sponsorship, expecially one that goes for several years.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, whatever the contract says, the thing that makes sponsorships work and relationships endure is a keen interest by the sport (and sometimes the players) about what the sponsor's business goals are, how they change and what the sports can do to help deliver them. More often than not, it's small things that incur no opportunity cost to the sport that can make all the difference to the sponsor.
Thanks for the comment Andrew, so very true.
ReplyDeleteSponsorship can certainly make for complex relationships between the sponsor and team, with both positive and negative results stemming from, as you say, small things.
Thanks,
the Executive Series team.