B2B Sponsorships

 

Sponsorship is fun. Compare a day spent planning a corporate evening at the theatre your organisation sponsors, to a day spent planning the co-ordinates of a new banner ad or, worse, trying to optimise your website. Sponsorship in B2B is huge and it seems like the big boys are enjoying the lion’s share: IBM at Wimbledon, Canon at Euro 2004, FedEx at Formula 1, Ernst & Young at major art exhibitions.

Of course, it’s not all strawberries and champagne. Used properly, sponsorship can be a fiercely effective marketing device – Ernst & Young’s chairman Nick Land reported doing over £1 million worth of business on the first night of the Monet exhibition. On a reputed investment of £700,000, he proclaimed it one of the most cost-effective marketing exercises the company had ever undertaken.

What to sponsor?

Sometimes there’s a palpable connection between sponsor and event: Canon sponsored Euro 2004 because of the visual link between football and its technology and Fedex sponsors road safety charity, Brake, because its couriers cover 6.5 million miles per year on UK roads. Other connections are less discernible, for example, software solutions provider, SAP’s sponsorship of the Donmar Warehouse or Ernst & Young’s choice of art exhibitions does not immediately make sense. However, it can be these odd partnerships that give the greatest bang for their buck.

Ten years ago Ernst & Young was looking for something different. “Art sponsorship was an opportunity to entertain clients in a way that competitors were not,” says Nicky Major, head of sponsorship at Ernst & Young. Blockbuster exhibitions it has sponsored since include Cezanne at the Tate and Monet in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy of Arts.

SAP took up its sponsorship of the Donmar Warehouse in 2001 partly because the new marketing director, Peter Robertshaw, harboured a desire to sponsor the theatre since he saw the musical Assassins in 1992 (when he worked as an implementation consultant). And partly because the 30-year-old company had acquired an ‘older’ image, which Robertshaw felt would be offset by the funky, innovative and young brand values of the Donmar.

With only 250 seats along four rows, the Donmar is an intimate venue; with statuesque actresses such as Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow treading the boards it’s an extraordinary venue.

High-performance arts

Corporate hospitality is, perhaps, the greatest benefit of sponsorship. Unlike traditional hospitality where the locale inevitably varies, sponsorship allows the organisation to build up a relationship with one venue. The results of this are flawless masterpieces of corporate entertainment that have clients gasping for more.

Ernst & Young sponsors art exhibitions at high profile galleries and venues, such as the Victoria & Albert and the National Gallery. The exhibitions tend to last about three months and the organisation hosts 10-20 corporate events (per exhibition) with 200-300 senior business figures per night. Organising staff act as hosts, addressing guests by name and effecting introductions between them and the relevant partners.

Major comments, “As a professional services firm, building relationships is extremely important. We can entertain in a beautiful environment and talk to clients and prospects.” She cites this as one of the main reasons why Ernst & Young opted to sponsor the arts instead of sporting events where the opportunities for meaningful interchange are few.

Opening night opens doors

SAP felt removed from its end-customer – the CIO, CEO and CFO – because its software is implemented by partner firms. Robertshaw, marketing director at SAP, comments, “The Donmar was a wonderful way to get to the CIO and through them we could invite the finance people and the CEO.” SAP only uses the theatre four times a year for corporate hospitality, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. Seventy clients, prospects and their spouses are invited; Robertshaw, evidently a fan, enthuses, “They’re sitting just a couple of feet away from Gwyneth Paltrow [who starred in Proof at the Donmar in 2002].”

The play is followed by dinner at the Ivy “People either know about the Donmar or the Ivy so it becomes a sticky date in their diaries, very few people cancel.” Branded rickshaws take guests from the theatre to the restaurant; Robertshaw remembers a night it rained and the company had a minibus backup but everyone went in the rickshaws regardless of the weather.

Not all companies use their sponsorship arrangement to build relationships with company chiefs. IBM takes a more practical approach to its hospitality at Wimbledon. Christian Johansson, manager of strategic brand and advertising at IBM, comments, “IBM uses the championship as a technology showcase for new and existing customers.”

While Canon exploited its sponsorship at Euro 2004 to reward dealers: “An extensive corporate hospitality experience was tied in to Canon’s existing dealer incentive programme, which rewarded dealers and partners for generating increased sales,” says Jessica Stevens, general manager of communications at Canon.

Employee perks

Sponsorship can also work its magic at the coalface, making employees feel valued and rewarded. Ernst & Young offers its employees the tangible perk of two free tickets per art exhibition. Juxtaposed with this are weekend family workshops at the gallery and talks by curators in the workplace.

SAP exploits the resources at the Donmar to maximum employee gain. Senior managers, for instance, were sent on a scriptwriting course taught by the playwright Steve Waters. It focused on how Shakespeare and his ilk persuade their audience with words. Robertshaw tells how the managers were asked to choose a play and act it out, “their choice of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross was a little discomforting,” he says. With lines like “You can’t close the leads you’re given, you can’t close shit, you are shit, hit the bricks pal, and beat it”, it’s little wonder why.

Brand exposure

With unlimited opportunities and boundless potential, brand exposure is often the crux of the pro-sponsorship argument and anyone looking for backup need look no further than IBM.

The marketing folk at IBM prefer to call the relationship with Wimbledon a ‘partnership’ as opposed to a ‘sponsorship’ as it provides the technology support for the tournament. Regardless, it is the ultimate coup in B2B sport sponsor/partnership and semantics will not prevent B2B Marketing citing it as such.

Johansson, strategic brand and advertising manager, comments, “IBM benefits from brand ‘hits’ via TV coverage when scores are shown on screen.

“However, brand presence at the championships is discreet, in keeping with the club’s desire to maintain the look and feel of tennis in an English country garden.”

Luckily for IBM, the rest of London has scant regard for the ‘look and feel of an English country garden’. The logo is ubiquitous for the two-weeks: on cabs, in train stations and in the national media. Last summer IBM had 10 liveried taxis targeting London; 100 taxis had IBM ‘Cabvision’ screens (which ran 2×30 second ads per hour); the seats and the receipts were also branded. At major train stations branded scoreboards were positioned in prime locations on the concourse. And the Metro (London’s free newspaper)featured IBM’s daily stats with a not too discreet logo.

Online activity was just as rampant with multi-feed banners across cyberspace and a menagerie of ads on the official championship website.

Brand exposure is not exclusive to sports sponsorship. Sponsoring an art event provides a litany of opportunities for brand exposure: posters, ads, tickets, websites, programmes and leaflets. Ernst & Young’s upcoming exhibition in February, Turner Whistler Monet, at Tate Britain was getting media coverage on the BBC in November. However, don’t assume that free PR is a given. Robertshaw of SAP comments, “It was SAP’s first time to do arts sponsorship [at the Donmar] and we thought some free PR would come of it but we soon learned that the UK arts press are loathe to mention the sponsors.”

Giving something back

Sponsorship in itself is an act of corporate social responsibility, though most organisations tend to go further by tacking on some extras, thus giving this dimension added value. Fedex’s sponsorship of the Fedex Brake Road Safety Academy is almost totally altruistic. Jeremy Twaite, MD, comments, “It’s got no direct bearing on improving Fedex’s global revenues.” Similarly, Canon’s sponsorship of the World Wildlife Fund is driven more out of concern for the environment than gaining return on investment.

However, even the companies making a reputed £1 million a night at their sponsorship events are giving something back. Ernst & Young has joined up with children’s charity NCH to provide workshops and art classes to some of the country’s most disadvantaged children; their work is then displayed at exhibitions. SAP gives free theatre seats to two secondary schools in the Feltham area (where it’s based) and also jointly funded a theatre study guide that was given to the students.

Money and measurement

Chartered Institute of Management guidelines advises that 50 per cent of the sponsorship budget goes towards leveraging the sponsorship investment and most organisations tend to budget in this way. Canon spent £18 million on a pan-European advertising activity to support its Euro 2004 sponsorship. Similarly IBM has an extensive marketing and media relations campaign around Wimbledon.

Measuring the effectiveness of the sponsorship is not as monochrome, in fact, this has been identified as the single most important challenge facing the sponsorship industry. Himanshu Vaishampayan, global brands/communications consultant at Shell, states that – despite popular opinion – awareness is a weak metric and that essentially Shell’s intention regarding sponsorship is to make sure that “the value received is greater than the amount invested.”

Ernst & Young does telephone-based research with guests after a corporate evening, which measures brand favourability and awareness. Major comments, “It doesn’t give exact pound value but you get an indication of what sort of effect it is having on the target market.”

What’s lacking in formal feedback is more than compensated for in anecdotal evidence: Ernst & Youngs £1 million night at the Royal Academy of Arts, IBM is lauded for serving a ‘Wimbledon ace’ in the business press. Then there’s the story of the wife of the head of PriceWaterhouseCoopers EMEA, who was annoyed with her tardy husband on SAP’s first night of sponsorship at the Donmar because she had been anticipating the show for so long. While not wishing to enjoy the lady’s displeasure Robertshaw was quietly pleased as it confirmed the Donmar as the right choice.

Sponsorship is the ultimate in brand exposure (targeting many groups simultaneously with different messages); it acts as an incentive to staff and it provides the most exclusive venues for corporate hospitality. It should also be fun and on a dreary January day what more can you ask for?

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