Big Brands Do Small Sponsorship 11th June, 2012

Brands become involved with sponsorship for a variety of reasons – to create awareness, to raise credibility, or to improve people’s perceptions of the brand as a whole. The most notable sponsorship deals grace the front covers of our national papers providing the appearance that global brands only sponsor large properties such as the Olympics, UEFA, and Premier League Football. However, this is not always the case.

Brands such as Adidas and Orange supplement their larger sponsorship properties with community partnerships helping them solidify their positioning and also strengthening the potential for advocacy through closer engagement.

Adidas Women’s 5K Challenge

The Adidas Women’s 5K challenge although still a relatively large event with 20,000 participants is a great example of a smaller partnership intended to raise perceptions of the brand through focusing on the female consumer. Although unisex, Adidas as a sports brand is more readily associated with a male audience particularly because of its association with male-orientated events highly publicised in the news such as UEFA.

For this reason, Adidas’s sponsorship of the Women’s 5K Challenge was a successful sponsorship strategy for the brand for a number of reasons:

The focus on a solely female audience helped position the importance of women as consumers
It created an emotion tie-in, touching on the heart strings of the female audience through the event’s charity support of Breakthrough Breast Cancer
Exclusive naming rights ensured that Adidas stood out from its competitors

Orange Sponsors Swanswell’s Football Kit

Swanswell is a charity that works to help people overcome drug and alcohol addiction. Quite different from sponsoring one of the days a week – Orange Wednesdays – Orange supported the Swanswell five-a-side tournament by sponsoring their football kit for the season.

Trevor Bedford operations manager for Swanswell in Birmingham said:

We’re delighted that Orange has been able to sponsor our new kit, giving people an added incentive to do well and feel well.

Orange’s support for a charity such as Swanswell is beneficial to the brand for various reasons:

Small gesture, but creates association with Orange as a brand that cares about the individual as well as community
Larger issues that are important and relevant to society as a whole through affiliation with the national charity Swanswell
Orange becomes a more approachable brand from a consumer’s perspective – not just focused on targeting a mass audience
Brand differentiation and a change from their typical film sponsorship

Orange and Adidas are a few of many examples of big brands doing small sponsorship well. We hope to see more of it!

“We Have a Great Cause, Why Aren’t We Securing Sponsors?” 4th April, 2011

Charity Sponsorship: Top 3 Reasons Why You Aren’t Selling

I am often asked to provide consultancy to charities on how they can make their sponsorship propositions more attractive to brands. The charities are often well known and have great causes – with well-planned and well-attended events. Understandably, it’s difficult to understand why more brands aren’t getting involved.

After experience and investigation with a number of our charity clients, I’ve discovered that there are some very simple tips to help make charity sponsorship proposals more attractive to secure sales.

1. Is your sponsorship package worth what you are asking?

Just because you need a certain amount, that doesn’t mean that your package is worth that amount. Far too often I see sponsorship proposals that are clearly not valued based on their tangible benefits. Of course there is a certain amount of association with the charity that is ‘priceless’, but this is not the sole (or even usually the key) reason marketing directors will align their brand to your cause. However, the weight of sponsorship investment is assumed to be the majority of the charity association with media assets such as PR and print ads ‘thrown in’. This is definitely not the approach to take when putting together your sponsorship proposition. Marketing directors are a savvy bunch and they want to see tangible benefits to prove effectiveness. Which brings me to my second point…

2. Marketing directors are busy

Marketing directors receive thousands of proposals, opportunities, and ideas that they can choose from to promote their brand. Your sponsorship proposal is not only competing with other charity proposals, but also all the other available marketing platforms that the brand can align themself to. It is a cluttered market and you have to be clear and transparent. Although beautiful powerpoint presentations with great pictures tend to look great – they make for impractical sponsorship proposals.

Of course the sponsorship proposal will depend on your programme as this format can be effective for selling emotive campaigns. However, more often than not, it is rarely the most suitable option.

3. Make more time

Charities tend to work with limited resources and find it difficult to put all the plans in place well in advance. As such, they don’t start approaching sponsors until they have all of the event information confirmed – typically 3 months before the event takes place. This is typically the time they think it is appropriate to approach sponsors.

Although the event could be absolutely ideal for a brand’s positioning and objectives, very few brands have spare funds within their marketing budget or the additional resource to make use of the opportunity. Marketing budgets are typically planned at least 1 year in advance. Regardless of how much they may want to get involved, they will not have the budget to do so.

As such, charities need to either:

a) start working on the events plan earlier,

b) start approaching brands earlier, or

c) aim to only secure sponsorship for the annual events that have a clear direction and plan in place.

We have recently signed some great charity clients (such as Mencap) and will be blogging more charity sponsorship tips throughout the year. Make sure to check back often or subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss anything!