SPONSORSHIP RENEWAL TROUBLING YOU?

If you have a sponsorship contract coming up for renewal – and you’re unsure whether it’s delivering the value you need, we have a new solution that’s objective and crystal clear.

If you can’t identify a clear correlation between sponsorship activity and either brand equity or sales, you’re likely to be defaulting to old ways….

The old ways

Quant surveys are still strongly used despite reported preferences being widely discredited as little more than vaguely correlated to predicted behaviour.

The science: asking cognitive questions to test theoretical hypotheses (ie I am more likely to buy this product because I’ve been exposed to this sponsorship) would not pass the lowest bar of academic research

Airtime value / reach is a useful metric but exposure and reach do not equate to impact.

Airtime value and reach have value in initial assessment and as a performance benchmark – but cannot predict emotional or behavioural impacts.

Sentiment analysis provided by social media monitoring is great at measuring buzz and buzz is probably the most useful proxy for value of the three because it correlates well with salience. But monitoring is getting harder each year with the privacy options that the SM networks are being forced to offer. And once again, high salience doesn’t guarantee either brand or sales impacts.

Head and Heart

The start point is always of course to look for direct correlations – and we’re pretty good at unearthing these. But assuming we’ve drawn a blank, here are two metrics that will give you confidence.

Head

Database analysis examines your own customer and fanbase data.

By assigning unique identifiers to every individual, and matching this data against commercially available macro data from the likes of Facebook and Experian, we are able to identify the overlap in the two databases ie shared customers.

This enables us to build up highly detailed segmentations against your customer profiles – to understand the value of the fanbase in terms of buying behaviours. 

This not only quantifies the value of the direct fanbase but provides clear parameters for future digital marketing.

Heart

Pre-conscious testing tells you what your audience is actually feeling. It’s widely used in academic research for precisely that reason. 

Pre-conscious testing can deliver mission critical evaluation data throughout the sponsorship cycle – is the sponsorship delivering the values you need to acquire more customers, do people feel closer to your brand, do they see the product relevance in your sponsorship and more. 

In this scenario, we’d recommend a simple brand affinity metric – what percentage of your audience genuinely feel better about your brand; and a mental availability metric – how closely do they associate your brand with the sponsored entity?

Head and Heart will give you a clear of the commercial value achievable of the sponsorship fanbase and a precise picture of the impact the sponsorship is having on your brand.

If we want to be really clever, we can bring Head and Heart together and test brand equity against these segments.

For evaluation-related posts, see below or visit our blog

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