Sunday
Oct282007
Smart Sponsorship – Making Your Own Glass Slipper.
By Sonya Winterbotham
Sponsorship shouldn’t be one way traffic of your dollar sign. It’s advertising, and R.O.I. must be justified, but are you doing everything you can to make it work?
Case Study No. 3:- XXXX Gold – Beach Cricket – Summer 2007.
It’s already taken… the sponsorship deal you want… Do you turn around head down, tail between your legs and scurry back to the office for an afternoon of self pity? Or do you reinvent the wheel – to suit yourself?
XXXX Gold is Lion Nathan’s biggest volume brand – it pretty much owns the mid strength beer market… but the bullets in this category are always flying. So when XXXX Gold was looking to align itself with a big sporting event over summer (peak period for beer sales) and all the Cricket Australia related events were sewn up with Foster’s brand VB… XXXX Gold designed their own event.
XXXX Gold approached marketing and event companies to develop a beach cricket concept from scratch. Now if you’re already familiar with XXXX Gold’s advertising you’ll know it brands (very broadly) to a 35+ male market… guys that grew up with AB captaining Australia, the lanky legs of Curtly Ambrose playing for West Indies and Graham Gooch at the helm of the Poms. So XXXX Gold recruited these legends of the game for a bit of fun on the sand, playing a sport that unites the nation.
This concept not only fit with their existing advertising campaigns, but allowed them vital coverage and press normally associated with the big international events. Fosters chose to call the idea “ambush marketing”, while others just call it – pure GOLD.
This wasn’t just a XXXX Gold sponsored event – this was a XXXX Gold initiative. They invented their own sponsorship vehicle… one that received massive media hype with Channel 10 signing on to cover the event; and huge local response with ticket allocation (free to the event) exhausted within an hour of availability.
But the sponsorship and marketing went much further and was fully integrated across point of sale. XXXX Gold released seven million cartons of product tagged with coupons to buy beach cricket merchandise, they also released limited edition “beach cricket” cans and stubbies; and designed a special event website with an online beach cricket game.
Inventing the event you want to sponsor is quite the risk - no proven results or success, just wading into the water to see if you can beat or at least compete with the others. But the results showed that for the six months ending March 31 2007, XXXX Gold was up 7% YTD, ahead of category growth of 5%... and Lion Nathan attributes that directly to their risk taking sponsorship deal.
Granted… we don’t all have the XXXX budget, but when you open your mind to ideas and opportunity, even when all avenues appear shut, you might just find gold.
Sponsorship shouldn’t be one way traffic of your dollar sign. It’s advertising, and R.O.I. must be justified, but are you doing everything you can to make it work?Case Study No. 3:- XXXX Gold – Beach Cricket – Summer 2007.
It’s already taken… the sponsorship deal you want… Do you turn around head down, tail between your legs and scurry back to the office for an afternoon of self pity? Or do you reinvent the wheel – to suit yourself?
XXXX Gold is Lion Nathan’s biggest volume brand – it pretty much owns the mid strength beer market… but the bullets in this category are always flying. So when XXXX Gold was looking to align itself with a big sporting event over summer (peak period for beer sales) and all the Cricket Australia related events were sewn up with Foster’s brand VB… XXXX Gold designed their own event.
XXXX Gold approached marketing and event companies to develop a beach cricket concept from scratch. Now if you’re already familiar with XXXX Gold’s advertising you’ll know it brands (very broadly) to a 35+ male market… guys that grew up with AB captaining Australia, the lanky legs of Curtly Ambrose playing for West Indies and Graham Gooch at the helm of the Poms. So XXXX Gold recruited these legends of the game for a bit of fun on the sand, playing a sport that unites the nation.
This concept not only fit with their existing advertising campaigns, but allowed them vital coverage and press normally associated with the big international events. Fosters chose to call the idea “ambush marketing”, while others just call it – pure GOLD.
This wasn’t just a XXXX Gold sponsored event – this was a XXXX Gold initiative. They invented their own sponsorship vehicle… one that received massive media hype with Channel 10 signing on to cover the event; and huge local response with ticket allocation (free to the event) exhausted within an hour of availability.
But the sponsorship and marketing went much further and was fully integrated across point of sale. XXXX Gold released seven million cartons of product tagged with coupons to buy beach cricket merchandise, they also released limited edition “beach cricket” cans and stubbies; and designed a special event website with an online beach cricket game.
Inventing the event you want to sponsor is quite the risk - no proven results or success, just wading into the water to see if you can beat or at least compete with the others. But the results showed that for the six months ending March 31 2007, XXXX Gold was up 7% YTD, ahead of category growth of 5%... and Lion Nathan attributes that directly to their risk taking sponsorship deal.
Granted… we don’t all have the XXXX budget, but when you open your mind to ideas and opportunity, even when all avenues appear shut, you might just find gold.
Marketing
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