Present your world through Branding: Sponsorship

Nowadays when we discuss marketing we always seem to have the word branding right next to the side. Both of them go hand in hand and in the sports-entertainment realm marketing & branding are essential. This series of posts focus on Passionis Sports specialties: brand identity, branding, marketing, experiential marketing & sponsorship. Today we are going to focus on the benefits of using sponsorship to enhance your brand and how to use effective branding to maximize partnerships in the exciting world of sports!

First of all we need to define what is a brand: the brand is your promise to your customers. But going further as Neumeier (2006) puts it,

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s a GUT FEELING because we’re all emotional, intuitive beings, despite our best efforts to be rational. It’s a PERSON’S gut feeling, because in the end individuals, not by companies, markets, or the so-called general public, define the brand. Each person creates his or her own version of it. (P.2)

With these concepts in mind we can say that branding is about perception & experience, how each person perceive and experiences the brand will determine their gut feeling toward the brand.  Nowadays companies are looking to generate a positive experience, which in turn generates positive feelings for the consumers, and a great tool to do this is through sponsorship. Sponsorship is a great tool for brands looking to make powerful and emotional connections with sports that will benefit them to generate positive feelings and experiences to reach their consumers.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a class with Mr. Edouard Legendre, Sponsorship Director at Ogilvy Madrid a creative agency where he discussed sponsorship, experiences, branding and putting the customer at the center of everything.  His job is to help brands find the right sponsorship partner that will align with their identity to generate value for the consumer; he also works with sports teams to help them find the right partner, and sponsorship activation as well.

In his lecture he discussed the importance of sponsorship for Spain in the last 20 years because successful sponsorship plans and activations have allowed many Spanish brands to become global brands. In his presentation he also talked about empowering the consumer, engagement and enrollment, this means that brands can no longer just present traditional media such as TV ads and print ads and expect results because the consumer is no longer enticed by them. Instead the consumer needs to be at the center of everything, consumers are looking for experiences, and things that make them feel in another place, taking them out from the ordinary into the extraordinary. With this Mr. Legendre discussed the importance of sponsorship as a tool to generate meaningful experiences.

The world of sports has attractive content that can be leveraged to create meaningful experiences, so brands with a clear brand strategy should incorporate sponsorship in their strategy. Sponsorship will allow them to generate positive feelings that will help them craft a real brand identity. Take a look at Nike, we all know Nike as the “just do it” brand, the brand that stands for athleticism, beating your limits, having drive, not quitting, among others. This perception has been crafted through sponsorship starting from Michael Jordan, Rafa Nadal to Cristiano Ronaldo. This has allowed Nike to generate positive experiences for the consumers while engaging them, which in turn have made consumers, develop a positive perception towards them making them more successful. Mr. Legendre mentioned that sponsorship as described by the Nike example is the perfect vessel to deliver a message through exciting content, making powerful emotional connections. Lastly he mentioned that in any branding strategy sponsorship should be included because it allows brands to interact directly with their consumers in order to differentiate themselves from other competitors.

 In Passionis Sports it is our aim to help both sports teams and companies create unique partnerships to generate a “win-win-win” situation putting customers right at the center. We understand the importance of being perceived in the right way, choosing the right sponsor and activating in the right way to create meaningful experiences inside the world of sports to develop unique brand identities!

References:

Neumeier, M. (2006).  The Brand Gap. Berkeley, CA. New Riders.