Sponsorship across the Accor funnel
In Unofficial Partner podcast #314, Stuart talked extensively about Accor’s application of sponsorship across the marketing funnel and Paris 2024. This abridged version of the interview focuses on the core business use of sponsorship by Accor. As usual, this edit has been edited for ease of reading. Stuart Wareman, SVP of Sponsorship, Events and Experiences […]
Sponsorship, branding and Byron’s big mistake
Please read this if you’re interested in how sponsorship changes brand perception.. This post wraps up a number of loose ends – so goes on a bit, sorry. Following a recent podcast, Ian Thompson, a sponsorship measurement expert, scoffed in a blog at the idea of brand value transfer – namely, that the values of […]
The 10 best World Cup sponsorship ambushes
Out top 10 FIFA World Cup sponsorship ambushes to warm you up for Qatar. Everyone loves a bad guy.
Sponsorship ambush : the bottom line
(For most businesses, self-ambush is the greater risk) The FIFA World Cup in Qatar is rapidly approaching and as always conversation turns to ambush, as we eagerly anticipate Nielsen’s media release on how adidas and Coca-Cola were bumped down the sponsor recall list by the sponsorship ambush of Nike and Pepsi. And Etihad of course. […]
Binet and Field and Sponsorship Marketing
Back in August, and not for the first time, Byron Sharp chose to undermine two voices which threaten his dominance in the field of marketing effectiveness – Les Binet and Peter Field. Our post, highlighting the ways in which sponsorship aligns with Byron Sharp’s new model for marketing, was well received – so we’re doing something […]
Sponsorship strategy hacks
There’s no substitute for doing sponsorship strategy properly – and our post Eight steps to great sponsorship strategy is about the best online guide there is. But as sponsorship consultants, we know there are a few hacks that take you very close, very quickly. We rarely shortcut our own process, but we do use these […]
Sponsorship strategy and brand fit
The Psychology of Sponsorship #4 The 4th post in our series on the psychology of sponsorship looks at sponsorship strategy and brand fit – and specifically to answer four questions. What is brand fit? How is congruence relevant to sponsorship strategy? What influences our sense of brand fit? How can I improve my sponsorship brand […]
The Sinek Qua Non of sponsorship
The Psychology of Sponsorship #3 The third post in our theme of the Psychology of Sponsorship explores how sponsorship narrative can be strengthened by understanding the nature of psychological attribution. Simon Sinek’s ‘Why?’ framing of business purpose reminds us nicely of a simple psychological truth : we all seek meaning, we’re meaning-makers. We make […]
Why sponsorship?
Why sponsorship as your marketing strategy? As we wrote in our post Great Sponsorship Strategy in 8 Steps, the first step towards great sponsorship is to define your strategic challenge. But this exercise in itself links to a fundamental question: why sponsorship as your marketing strategy? To ask this question is perhaps a discriminator for […]
Great sponsorship strategy in 8 steps
There’s certainly no shortage of posts out there on the web talking about sponsorship strategy. In fact, in the context of sponsorship, the word strategy is used pretty indiscriminately in general, and even here by HBR, as a sophisticated-sounding way of saying ‘this is how to go about sponsorship’: a primer, in other words. The question […]
Why you should sponsor FinLit – with MAIA
(Especially if you’re in FS) In 2015, we received an amazing brief from a UK High Street bank. It was to find or develop a platform capable of delivering social impact and building community engagement. With reach, relevance and salience. For a retail bank, that means community with a small c, ie communities the length […]
What is sponsorship?
The following article first appeared as the conclusion to the Redmandarin publication ‘Defining Sponsorship‘. It provides a clear analysis of the roots of what sponsorship and sound sponsorship strategy is all about and is helpful both for students and practitioners. So where to start? The only definition that’s readily available is from the European Sponsorship […]
Sponsorship portfolio strategy
This article springboards off a great article by Francis Dumais, who identified six major variations of sponsorship portfolio strategy. Francis took the term sponsorship strategy and applied it very legitimately to the strategic choice facing brands around how they choose to structure their sponsorship investment, across portfolios or single properties. Each of these alternatives represents […]
Learnings from Olympic sponsorship consultancy
We chose to specialise in Olympic sponsorship consultancy because the scale of the undertaking ensures that the partnership has the full attention of the business – and sponsorship has the fullest application across the business. We published Working the Olympics in 2012 – based on our experience with ten Olympic partners and interviews with a […]
The psychology of sponsorship
The Psychology of Sponsorship #1 Most books on sponsorship make large assumptions about the psychology of sponsorship. Back in the day, the phrase ‘brand value transfer’ was thrown around liberally to explain how sponsorship works, with no little authority, of course! (tuneupfitness.com) But in the last 10 years in particular, our understanding of the emotional […]
Sponsorship as ‘social object’
Mark is a recovering adperson who now writes and talks and works independently under the banner of HERD Consulting, helping people and organisations and their collaborators come to terms with our social or HERD nature. Prior to HERD Mark held senior positions at Ogilvy Group Worldwide and the radical creative co-operative St Luke’s. This interview […]
Sponsorship Strategy : Building Competitive Edge
We were reviewing our search performance over Christmas (as you do) and were shocked to rank low against the term sponsorship strategy. Which is criminal as Redmandarin was the sponsorship industry’s first strategy consultancy – and even now is one of a handful (or fewer) of agencies globally which specialise in strategy. But there’s no […]
TOP (TECTONIC OPERATIONAL PLAY)
The IOC’s new TOP deal, which brings together The Coca-Cola Company and Chinese dairy giant Mengniu in a new joint category, has been launched with the fanfare of a US$3bn total investment in the partnership, including a commitment to unprecedented online promotional spend. The values represented by the IOC are canonical, which perhaps explains why […]
The danger of being dazzled by the latest
I imagine the entire marketing industry is now considering the impact of Proctor and Gamble’s Chief Marketing Officer, Marc Pritchard’s, groundbreaking presentation at the recent IAB Annual Leadership meeting on the issues around digital marketing. Marc’s speech was refreshingly open and Mark Ritson in his recent Marketing Week piece describes it as the “biggest marketing speech for 20 […]
In search of community
Community as a marketing term really started buzzing back in the 90s. It was .com days, the world was alight with online content propositions and ‘building community’ was all anyone had to do. Building community was a great phrase for that era, because it had an optimistic ring and easy promise which ‘building a customer-base’ […]
For your consideration
Return of engagement’s a seductive little phrase, isn’t it? It holds the promise of customers and public alike interacting with – and caring about – your brand. As such, it’s far more engaging in itself than classic terms like consideration or preference. The first time we heard it used was by Saatchi & Saatchi […]
Changing the game
Jean Noel Kapferer, in his comprehensive tome Strategic Brand Management, talks of brand as a conditional asset, and it’s one of his most helpful phrasings, suggesting as it does, that the value of the brand asset depends largely on what businesses do with it. The same is of course true of sponsorship: it’s a very […]
‘just the guy who ponied up the money’
First published in Defining Sponsorship, Tony Ponturo’s interview was seismic in the powerful way it articulated the change in consumer attitudes – expressed with Tony’s trademark candour. Tony Ponturo is the founder and CEO of Ponturo Management Group, LLC; a consulting, management and investment company in media, sports and entertainment. Previously he was President and […]