Editorial Articles

Making the Beautiful Game Irresistible: creating value from sports sponsorship

Brands that sponsor teams during a major sporting event like the World Cup can expect huge returns in airtime, awareness and positive association. Smart brands like Coca Cola extend sponsorship associations by involving fans – in Coca Cola’s case, encouraging them to upload content for its advertising campaign. Sony is offering winning fans tickets to the World Cup if they ‘recreate’ one of the great football moments of all time on the site ‘My Beautiful World Cup Moment’.

But what happens to that good will once the World Cup’s over? How do brands keep up momentum with fans? Or do they accept that when the final whistle goes, the relationship’s over?

Sports brands have always led the way in engaging fans, at games and online. Adidas, a partner of the National Basketball Association (NBA), created an application for Chinese website Xiaonei.com (now Renren)’s popular game ‘Basketball superstars’, where players create their own virtual basketball team. Adidas added virtual branded gear to the game, which players could purchase using virtual credits. The more Adidas equipment a team wears, the better its chances of winning. This game extends the life of the association beyond just the pitch.

Even the big media groups are getting in on the act and launching football websites: News International’s www.fansown.co.uk; and the Mirror’s www.mirrorfootball.co.uk. But neither of these really embrace community spirit, creating instead glorified information-based microsites (albeit with fans’ forums), rather than a real community.

Some brands are getting it right. Irish telecoms provider, eircom, sponsors the Republic of Ireland national football team. Rather than just put a logo on shirts, the company wanted to find a way of connecting with fans, and creating a raft of exclusive benefits for eircom customers. The result is SoccerRepublic (soccerrepublic.eircom.com) that was initially designed for fans to get behind the Irish team’s World Cup efforts.

But sport is an unpredictable business, and the exposure a sponsor gets will depend on the success of its team. Unless, of course, it can find a way to transfer that association beyond the pitch. A community such as SoccerRepublic allows eircom to do just that: creating content that focuses not just on the World Cup, but on all aspects of Irish football, at both international and league level. Fans use the site as a knowledge source, sounding board, swap-shop and a place where they can get the inside track on players.

The beauty of a community like this is that the brand can control the environment in a way that it can’t do on the major networks; and it can use the community to generate additional value. A ready-made community has value in terms of display advertising from complementary brands (and fans are much more open to relevant advertising in a specialist community than they might be on a generic network like Facebook); exclusive content and competitions generate brand loyalty; and inviting partners into the community can offset investment cost through sponsorship of areas of the site.

But the real value is in the way brands can interact with customers, within its own branded space. For a company such as a utility company, whose contact with consumers is usually functional or service-led, this offers the chance to engage with customers in a way that it probably wouldn’t have in its normal course of business. Consumers will come to a branded community if it is compelling enough; and will stay if there is a good reason to do so.

That, unlike the outcome of the World Cup, is something sponsoring brands can control.

Graeme Harvey
Client Services Director, HuzuTech
Twitter: HuzuTech