I feel like a lot of sponsorship deals still get done with no real strategic foundation behind them.

The kind of deals where the brand perhaps hasn’t been involved in sport before, and gets a little bit carried away when a rights-holder approaches them with something that looks exciting and “too good to turn down” ?

I won’t name them but a few years ago I was working on general marketing and comms with a global drinks brand, which was doing very well. Out of nowhere, a very famous Premier League football club managed to pitch a partnership deal to the marketing director, and without a whole lot of thought going into it, they signed on the dotted line.

We all tried to make the best of it with some hasty retro-fitting of a positioning for the partnership and an activation plan, but it was pretty obviously not a great fit for the brand, wasn’t embraced internationally and didn’t get renewed. It basically became an expensive and poorly targeted media buy.

In contrast, I’ve worked with brands that decide to invest the time up front to really work out what they want to achieve from sponsorship, before they even look at any specific opportunities:

– What problem are we trying to solve?
– What audience are we trying to reach?
– How does this audience interact with sport?
– What elements of our brand do we want to reinforce?

By investigating these questions (especially if your brand is new to sponsorship) we can create a solid framework for identifying the kind of properties and activation strategies that are going to be a good fit, rather than just randomly reacting to the next proposal that lands in the inbox.