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!