Targeting perception change in sponsorship

perception change

Perception change is an almost constant objective of sponsorship – and success relies on the ability to change our audiences’ feelings towards a brand. What does that mean in practice?

In our post on the principles of sponsorship evaluation, we referenced the concept of the logic model – a tool we’ve used (on and off) for well over a decade. Logic models, like theories of change, originated in the world of NGO or impact-led project, funding and a need to demonstrate the efficacy of funding investments. Both attempt to show the chain of connection from resources (investment) to impacts, via activities, outputs and outcomes.

Most sponsorship measurement models today maintain the distinction between outputs and outcomes, at least in principle. Outputs are the measurable indices of a sponsorship’s execution, such as take up of hospitality, share of search, social media engagement etc ; while outcomes being the desired business results e.g. changes in consideration, sentiment and sales. Using the logic model has forced us to introduce a third metric, to help fill in the gap between investment and outcome and provide a measurement of the critical steps required to deliver that outcome.

Let’s explore the case of a brand outcome, a nearly universal objective in sponsorship, consideration, which is the mental inclusion of a brand within the customer’s mental list of acceptable suppliers of a product or service. Although consideration is the desired outcome, it’s not possible to ‘target’ consideration. To make it onto the customer’s mental list, a brand needs to meet a combination of both practical and emotional criteria that act as an assessment shortlist for each consumer. The Byron Sharp school call them Category Entry Points.

Practical criteria such as value for money, available, affordable, long lasting, environmentally sustainable, etc, are measures which can be assessed ‘more or less’ objectively and addressed by product education – ensuring customers understand key features of performance through advertising, sampling, PR etc

Emotional criteria, such as reputable, cool, likeable, relevant, impressive, glamorous etc, on the other hand can’t really be assessed objectively by the individual – or communicated directly – so the objective here is to build positive associations with the customer. All media play a role but of course sponsorship is our focus here.

Consideration is usually assessed by a collection of behavioural indices ranging from share of search and social media engagement to website visits and downloads, which collectively build an overall image of product interest. But isolating sponsorship’s impact on share of search is impossible and most other indices are behaviours targeted by performance marketing, so while it’s reasonable to assume some correlation with consideration, as informative as they feel, these metrics don’t shed much light on sponsorship impact on consideration.

For a brand to assess its progress in actually changing consideration requires it to understand its success in increasing mental availability, growing customer product knowledge and changing feelings – and this is where the logic model provides useful structure.

If we just focus on sentiment, the logic model asks, simply, what do we need to do to make our customers feel we are more … reputable, likeable, relevant, impressive etc? What resources do we need, how will we use them and how do we believe that will change their feelings?

In terms of sentiment, the selection of a sponsorship itself can address a number of these attributes. Reliable, confident, impressive etc and other attributes can be communicated through the associative power of major property sponsorship.

The power of the sponsorship halo is such that it can also influence brand perceptions which are in themselves objectively verifiable – such as global. The automatic association between sponsor and sponsorship appears to be strongest in respect of the strongest levels of assumption. Most people are relatively confident that FIFA, for example or the IOC are very powerful global organisations and so sponsors benefit easily from those associations. 

Fewer people however would feel comfortable to pass judgement on FIFA’s status as innovators, or the internal culture of the IOC, and so other dimensions of brand perception – such as young, cool, friendly, likeable, sophisticated, innovative, dynamic, technical, contemporary etc – require targeted activation.

So the logic model, to reiterate, requires an explanation to the question : on what basis do we believe our activation is going to change perception at the scale required? This interrogation of perceptual cause and effect is the fundamental value of the logic model in sponsorship and in our experience the stage that’s most often missing from or glossed over in sponsorship planning. Building the logic model requires assumptions about levels of impact by channel, and the insight which underpins confidence in the impact to be explicit. It opens up the whole process to debate, in other words.

From our experience, our two most stand-out clients – in developing a rigorous cause and effect approach to sponsorship impact – were T-Mobile and Lloyds Banking Group.

T-Mobile were single-minded in their focus on shifting brand perception and applied this focus with equal rigour to every dimension of their sponsorship – with amazing results. T-Mobile’s experiential was designed single-mindedly around the need to change specific attributes of the brand and, along with its advertising of course, absolutely transformed its brand and business fortunes. (Curiously, both Phil Barden, UK MD of Decoded Marketing, with whom we collaborate, and Dr Paul Marsden, our psychological adviser, were both at that time sitting at different sides of the TMo table. Phil was Head of XXXX for T-Mobile Europe and Paul was agency-side but refining their measurement of customer satisfaction.)

As a Partner of London 2012, Lloyds Banking Group, under the leadership of Sally Hancock and Stuart Beaver, did not have that single-minded focus but were equally fanatical about understanding the drivers of perception in the British public. Over the course of our work with them, Lloyds came to see a clear relationship between brand consideration and the extent to which consumers saw the brand’s Partnership as making a real contribution to communities across the UK.

The final question of course is how to measure the changes in the critical indices that underpin the desired impacts on perception and behaviour. In the language of Sharp, we’re measuring mental availability and strength of memory structures – by strength and valence of association with the Category Entry Points.

Our preferred methodology is Implicit Association Testing, which allows us to get below the surface of language – although Chat GPT’s ability to measure semantic relatedness holds out the promise of a more global solution in the future.

As a consequence of our recent work with Logic Models, we’ve revisited our language to align with Logic Model and Theory of Change terminology, so for us now an Outcome is now the successful achievement of an enabling objective and an Impact is the desired change . This also has the value of aligning our measurement model with purpose-led activity, which targets impacts, such as environmental or social impact, giving us a common frame of reference and measurement.

For more posts on the psychology of sponsorship, measurement and logic models, please visit our blog.

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