Sponsorship strategy is all about building competitive edge : how do we use sponsorship to delivery against our key objectives?
And it starts with asking the right questions:
These are some of the questions we address with excellence in sponsorship strategy.
In a sponsorship world full of opportunity, we help clients understand if and how they should be using sponsorship.
Before talking strategy, below are four questions you should be asking yourself :
We only view sponsorship as a tool to accelerate business objectives. Our starting point begins with your objectives and understanding the potential role of sponsorship. As your partner, we bring objectivity to the question : is sponsorship the best way to achieve these, and what role can sponsorship legitimately play?
As passionate as we are about excellent sponsorship, we’re not looking to sell you sponsorship. So we look broadly at your needs and define for you exactly and realistically where you should look to sponsorship to deliver – and where not.
For an overview of our current process to deliver excellence in sponsorship strategy, click here.
The most expensive sponsorships are not always the best. And everyone knows a cautionary tale…or two.
In fact, one of sponsorship’s greatest sins is its wastage : geographic, audience, assets that you as a brand don’t need. Or partnerships of a scale you simply can’t afford to service well.
So we look at organisational structure and resource and help frame your expectations against sponsorships which you can work and which can work for you.
Our assessment is not media-driven but holistic, taking into account every relevant business parameter. The only goal – deliver best commercial value for our clients.
We hate to say it – because some of our best friends are in activation – but the business model of any activation agency depends on the size of your budget.
Even worse, many agencies take commissions from rights-holders. This may not influence their judgement – but, let’s face it, it’s likely to. And clever activation can only ever partly redeem poor strategy.
For many activation agencies, it’s their sales commissions which allows them to offer you strategy for free. Please don’t tell us they provide your evaluation as well!
The point of robust sponsorship strategy is to ensure that your investment, however small or large, delivers competitive advantage for your business. Like evaluation, it’s a relatively small investment to guarantee the bulk of your rights and activation budget is well spent.
We bring extra bandwidth, years of experience, and unique tools and methodologies to sponsorship and procurement teams – to nail those big decisions.
For strategy-related posts, see below or visit our blog.
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
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
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
