Why Purpose is the New Normal for Sponsorship Marketing
This excerpt comes from Chapter 2 of 3-Win Sponsorship: The Four Phases of Modern Sponsorship. I breakdown how sponsorship as a marketing discipline has evolved since the 1984 LA Olympics, from its infancy, in the Awareness phase, to its much more sophisticated and complex state today.
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The Purpose Phase (2010s–Present)
What we have seen in the 2010s is a shift into the purpose phase of sponsorship, which is what this book is all about. More and more, leading sponsors are integrating social, political, and environmental causes into their sponsorship activation with teams, athletes, artists, and musicians. This enables companies to align with the personal values of their core audience and connect in a more meaningful way.
Sponsorship professionals continue to leverage all of the assets they’ve been using over the past thirty-five years, but sponsorship has come a long way from simply slapping a logo on a billboard. Today, brands and properties are constantly creating content to serve up to consumers in such a way that it feels personal to each viewer. Every company must create meaningful, authentic, engaging content to win over consumers hearts, minds, and ultimately their wallets.
Professor Marty Conway told me that he sees sponsors measuring sponsorship not only for their return on investment or return on objectives, but also for a “return on heart,” so to speak. In order to connect on an emotional level with today’s consumer, purpose and cause marketing has become a driving force to successful sponsorship.
Kim Skildum-Reid believes that in the twenty-first century, best-practice sponsorship “is about nurturing a brand’s connection with a target market by putting their needs first.”
“The number one concept that drives best practice…sponsorship is the idea of win-win-win,” Skildum-Reid writes. “For years, good sponsorship was defined as being win-win, that is, the sponsor wins and the sponsorship seeker wins. While having this kind of mutual benefit is a great idea, this approach completely left out the most important part of the equation: The target markets.”
“Given that the target markets are the pivot point for the well-being of both the brand and the property, it makes perfect sense to make the target markets’ needs and wants part of the basic infrastructure of best practice sponsorship.”
The third win, therefore, should be the number one priority of all sponsors and sponsorship seekers. Building and executing effective sponsorships today is no longer about making the CEO feel good by slapping his company’s logo on a billboard at the ballpark. Best-in-class sponsorships are about creating value for the target audience in an authentic, meaningful way.
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In this article series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, 3-Win Sponsorship. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect you can reach me via email — john@thirdwin.com — or connect with me on Twitter & LinkedIn. You can also find my book on Amazon.
