How Brands Use Sporting Events to Engage with Customers
Part 1 — Sponsoring an Event
Sporting events bring a lot of opportunities for brands to engage with their target audience with emotions and passion for the sport usually running high. For this reason brands tend to engage with their audience around a sporting event.
We will be releasing 4 articles in the coming weeks; our series of articles we will be discussing 4 different approaches of how brands engage with their customers during sporting events.
The first type of engagement we’d like to look at is the sponsorship of the event. This form of engagement is the likely to give your brand the most awareness as every other brand engaging in a promotion around the event will have to mention your brand’s name due to licensing.
Although this may reap a lot of high rewards, it is also extremely costly to the brand. For example Barclays bank Sponsor (or should I say sponsored) the English Premier League, making it officially known as the Barclays Premier League.
This sponsorship has ended this season (2015–16) and will not run into the next season. Barclays had agreed on a £120m three-year deal in 2012, an increase of almost 50 per cent on their previous £82m contract. Though with Sky and BT Sport paying a record £5.1billion for TV rights from the start of the 2016–17 season, Barclays feared the cost of their next sponsorship will also rise considerably.
