Flexibility: The Key to Driving the Sponsorship Industry 5th November, 2014

Great sponsorship is borne from collaborative flexibility. The industry revolves around the ability to adapt and create innovative sponsorships that engage with consumers. An open-minded approach is a pre-requisite, the challenge for sponsorship agencies lies in absorbing brand anxiety and persuading them that sponsorship, strategised and executed correctly, is an incredibly diverse marketing platform that has the capacity to produce great return on investment.

The sponsorship industry has a level of flexibility that is unrivalled in the marketing world; where there’s sufficient synergy, activations can be created at any level of financial investment.

Three core considerations:

  1. Mindset: rights-holders have to understand the value that a brand can add to an event or product beyond financial investment. A certain level of flexibility needs to be retained by rights-holders to accommodate appropriate sponsors and their objectives.
  2. Budget Planning: brands need to be open-minded when planning budgets – an explorative and inquisitive mind-set is integral when considering properties they perhaps would normally overlook. Marketing objectives change and with it comes new opportunities for brands to interact with new audiences and events.
  3. Strategy: both parties need to accommodate the other’s objectives from the sponsorship – in most instances, both parties will need to be flexible when it comes to the actual delivery of the sponsorship.

Moving Forward

Flexibility is the key to delivering a successful sponsorship – the industry needs to not be constrained by pricing or bureaucracy, instead understanding how freedom of variance is required to create the most beneficial strategy for all parties involved. Clever sponsorship is able to deliver on virtually any marketing objective a brand might have, and so it should be doing so at every chance it can. The challenge is to look beyond the traditional benefits that any old marketing platform can provide brands, and delve deeper into other achievable objectives.

Think Bigger

The success or failure of a sponsorship should not be based purely upon ticking the boxes of each asset, but rather based upon the factors that emanated further down the line, the insight that evolves as a result of the synergies formed between both parties working collaboratively.

Being able to directly interact with a brand’s core audience is something that sets sponsorship apart from TV, radio, and outdoor advertising. If we can persuade brand managers to see the bigger picture in terms of the possibilities within sponsorship, the flexibility of the industry means that campaigns can be 100% individual. One of the most unique and exciting aspects of sponsorship is the endless opportunity; a little bit of creativity, vision, and desire, even if the investment is small, can lead to disproportionate benefits for everyone involved.