Amazingly, the relationship between Byron Sharp and sponsorship has not had much airtime, despite the fact that How Brands Grow has preoccupied the world of marketing for over a decade now. Despite resistance from the marketing community to the provocative rubbishing of many core marketing concepts, its message – a reappraisal of marketing 101 – has in large been welcomed. Mark Ritson, Marketing’s favourite voice in the UK, describes How Brands Grow as the most influential marketing book of the last decade and Ritson v Sharp is probably the best place to go for a balanced understanding of Sharp’s findings.
It’s arguable that the rhetorical relish of Sharp and his team leads them at times to overstate the case in their dismissal of the likes of differentiation, messaging, positioning and brand identity, but this is not the place to go over those arguments – it is however a good place to consider the role of sponsorship in meeting Sharp’s proposed New Model for marketing.
Here’s a reminder of what his new paradigm looks like.
Sharp’s New Model is based on mass penetration, which he powerfully argues is the main driver of commercial success. Sharp demonstrates that mass penetration brings with it greater loyalty and reduced churn. Effective mass marketing – as opposed to targeting – is therefore seen as the primary tool of growth. Growth in market share comes by increasing popularity. Loyalty and even brand love are not worth chasing asmost customers will only buy the brand occasionally.
In that context, sponsorship can rightfully claim an advantage in delivering Sharp’s new model. So let’s look briefly at each point of focus.
Salience
The first point is about the value of salience versus positioning. In other words, it’s better to be noticed than to rely on subtly different positioning.
While sponsorship can’t guarantee salience, it certainly favours it by offering brands a communication platform in environments where they’re not expected.
Most sponsorships also liberate brands from the need to deliver predictable product communications and offer a fresh creative canvas – while naming rights, title and shirt sponsorships, for example, clearly deliver visual salience.
Distinctiveness
Distinctiveness similarly.
Distinct as opposed to differentiated attributes and personality.
Scotia Bank is the bank of hockey in Canada. I’m unaware of its positioning In the Canadian set of financial services, but I’m very clear that there is only one bank majorly behind hockey. Portfolio strategies can be crafted to deliver distinctiveness.
Steven Keith, of Suncorp (formerly Petro-Canada), made a simple but powerful point in relation to their Olympic partnership: ‘When you talk to Canadians about what they know about Petro-Canada, 99% know the brand, 95% know we’re an oil and gas company – and 50 or 60% know we sponsor the Olympic team. And quite honestly, they don’t know really anything else’. Being an Olympic sponsor, in itself, was the most distinctive signifier for the Petro-Canada brand.
Getting noticed, emotional response
Sharp largely dismisses the value of sophisticated messaging compared to the value of making an emotional connection with consumers.
This chimes with two fundamental learnings about consumer mental processing. Firstly, we’re all cognitive misers, meaning that we only expend mental effort when absolutely necessary. Secondly, our emotions affect decision-making far more than we’re aware of or acknowledge. In other words, truly emotional connection with consumers is the bedrock of sales – and sponsorship plays, more than any other model for marketing, in the realm of emotion.
Relevant associations
Sharp doesn’t define relevant association but contrasts them with the concept of unique selling proposition. Extrapolating from his general drift, it sounds like he’s negatively comparing the value of carefully crafted USPs – which again require mental processing and advertising investment, with giving the consumer a clear sense of relevance.
By way of comparison, he reproduces the leading search terms of Yahoo US from 2008. Getting over our curiosity that he uses Yahoo (we’re Europe based), he makes a blunt point: that consumers are really not interested in the niceties of brand communications.
‘This is what people really think about! Also, six out of the top ten were the same as the previous year. Britney Spears has been an incredibly popular search term; she has been the most popular for seven out of eight years in the last decade.’
But without direct intention, Sharp’s point offers perhaps the most direct endorsement of sponsorship’s potential in the entire book, because association with Britney Spears is absolutely what sponsorship can deliver.
Refreshing and building memory structures
Sharp is clear that the role of advertising is to build memory structures.
What does he mean? ‘Memory consists of ‘nodes’ that hold pieces of information. If two pieces of information are associated (e.g. Vodafone and red), links exist between these nodes. Buyers have a network of information (also referred to as brand associations) linked to a brand name. For example, McDonald’s is associated with hamburgers, yellow arches and fast food. These links are developed and refreshed through experiences, … being exposed to marketing activities … and hearing about other people’s experiences.’ Memories are simply associations with cues that can bring a brand to mind.
Sharp believes the primary task of an advertising agency is to generate outstanding creative that viewers will want to process repeatedly, with the objective of refreshing the memory structures that relate to the brand.
He cites Coca-Cola as a great example of building relevant memory structures. ‘Coca-Cola is associated with a variety of memories: the beach and Coca-Cola, nightclubs and Coca-Cola, pizza and Coca-Cola, parties and Coca-Cola, cafes and Coca-Cola (‘the original long black’), the Coca-Cola bottle, Coca-Cola red, Coca-Cola swirl and so on. These memories make it more likely that Coca-Cola will come to mind; they make it easier for people to notice Coca-Cola and to process Coca-Cola’s advertising.’ (Author’s note: no signs of a mis-spent youth for this Professor!)
It’s presumably deliberate that he makes no mention of the FIFA World Cup or Olympics, for example – but for a sponsorship audience, he doesn’t really need to.
‘The more extensive and fresher the network of memory associations about a brand, the greater the brand’s chance of being .. thought of in … buying situations… Building mental availability is about developing different memory links to increase the scope of the brand-related network in people’s memories – the brand’s share of mind.’
Returning to Scotia Bank, association with the national sport dramatically extends the bank’s brand-related network.
Reaching
Sharp’s penultimate point emphasises reach over messaging. Don’t worry about product education, just reach more people with communications which strengthen brand memory structures.
We often sell sponsorship on the basis of its ability to target specific audiences : the take-out from How Brands Grow is simply: go as big as you can.
Emotional distracted viewers
His last comparison is in many ways a reframing of what’s gone before. Rather than rational communications which feed an info-hungry audience, brands need salience to cut through distraction and reach customers emotionally.
The ambition to cut through clutter unites every practitioner of sponsorship.
Last words
Sharp presents his findings as definitive, but many commentators and thinkers have pointed out the flaws in some of his arguments and his tendency to over-state the case – so it’s far from the whole story.
But that’s not the point – Sharp has been and continues to be hugely and justifiably influential in the world of marketing. Byron Sharp and sponsorship don’t appear to be immediate bedfellows, but sponsorship undeniably aligns closely to Sharp’s New Model as a valuable tool.
So for any sponsorship professional, think of this as a primer – bringing Byron Sharp and sponsorship in to any client conversation can only be positive!