I watch quite a lot of golf on Sky Sports. My wife would probably say that ‘quite’ is doing a fair bit of heavy lifting there, but anyway it’s for work, innit?
Rolex is pretty heavily involved in golf, and has been for a long time. And despite (or maybe because of…) the incredibly pompous copywriting in some of their ads, I very much associate Rolex with quality, precision, legacy, success, premiumness (is that a word?) tradition and various other qualities that also happen to exist in elite-level golf.
Is this image transfer at work? Has Rolex successfully borrowed these attributes from the properties and athletes it sponsors and transferred them to its own brand?
This, after all, is one of the big potential benefits of sponsorship for a brand. On top of basic visibility and the opportunity to engage/sell to fans, sponsorship can actually change what people think of a brand.
But does image transfer actually exist, or is it just a nice story we like to tell ourselves?
There’s actually a decent amount of academic research on this, which I won’t go into here. A lot of it is based on ‘associative network theory’ – the idea that our brains like to make easy connections between things.
The TL;DR answer is (as with most things): it depends.
It depends on there being a good fit between the brand and the property: no amount of golf sponsorship would make a cheap plastic watch brand into the new Rolex.
It depends on the prominence and level of the sponsorship: exclusivity and a clear sense of ‘ownership’ of the property/category is going to help people to build those associations much more clearly.
It depends on the activation: well-executed activation and engagement with fans is going to reinforce those positive associations.
It depends on time and repetition: it takes time for these associations to form and become established in someone’s brain, so don’t expect it to be an immediate process. Rolex has been involved in golf since 1967.
So it’s definitely not a given, but with the right approach and execution, a brand can take on some of the attributes of the sports property it aligns itself with.
Just a note of caution… negative image transfer is also a very real thing.
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