Sport sponsorships fall short of the goal line
By Aleksander Nowacki
For advertisers, sponsoring sports events is a brilliant way to build brand awareness and loyalty - almost incomparable to any other means of marketing in terms of efficiency in achieving its goals, industry professionals say.
That, at any rate, is how it looks at the local level.
"In Germany, there are hundreds of ballroom clubs and thousands of local events every year," said Tomasz Redwan, president of Redwan Sport Marketing, widely regarded as a pioneer of modern approaches to sport sponsorship in this country.
"If you sponsor an event like that, to say that people involved will be brand loyal is an understatement. They will feel it close to the skin."
Sponsoring events is a great opportunity for local businesses, such as bakeries or pubs, since it is a relatively inexpensive way of establishing a bond with the community. Sports events are particularly suitable for such purposes, as emotions tend to rise high on such occasions.
But on the national level, there is a widespread perception of a surfeit of advertising and promotional materials, which makes for diminishing returns from the traditional forms of marketing.
Experts, however, agree that businesses here have not yet caught up with the developments in sponsorship since the mid-1980s. The need for a long-term approach is often not realized, as companies are impatient for results. Since returns are difficult to quantify and often take years to show their benefits, such an approach may lead to sponsors withdrawing from a partnership before the benefits have been realized. Without a clear plan of what is to be achieved, the funds spent on sponsoring sports events are simply money wasted. Nor does the country's sports community operate professionally enough to make businesses appreciate the benefits of long-term partnerships.
The problem with selling advertising space on champion ski jumper Adam Małysz's jumpsuit is a case in point. That the skiing authorities should be unable to exploit the star potential of a national hero like Małysz is testimony to their unprofessional mode of operation, according to industry professionals. Adam Czarnecki of ARC Rynek i Opinia monitoring agency is, however, convinced that it is also a case of an opportunity wasted by the business world.
Czarnecki pointed out that the ski jumper's international success drove the advertising rates so high that businesses were afraid of losing money, should his star begin to wane. In later events, Małysz remained as successful as ever, exposing the fallacy of a short-term approach to sponsoring.
The advantages of forming a long-term partnership vary, as experts are keen to stress. An early investment in promising teams or athletes can allow for benefits to be reaped at a later stage and owning a team can be a profitable business in itself. But the more common scenario is for the sponsor to seek marketing benefits, and there are already encouraging examples of that happening in this country.
The top-flight football team Groclin Dyskobolia Grodzisk Wielkopolski is an example. The club's sponsor, the car upholstery producer Groclin, has little to gain from its logo exposure on the domestic market, as it does not target its product directly to the end user. It has, however, exploited the prestige of owning a football club in its successful quest to capture 12.5% of the EU market.
"Brand awareness is not all that sport sponsorship is about," Tomasz Redwan said. "Demonstrating the company's potential to business partners can also be an important aspect."
Amica Wronki, a household appliance producer that has also set up its own football club, agrees.
"Most of our production goes for export," said Franciszek Jóźwiak, sport-sponsorship specialist at the company. "Success in sport goes hand in hand with success in business. It creates a positive image of the company."
Experts also emphasize the strong points of projects such as telecom operator Netia's sponsorship of the K2 expedition, which successfully exploits the symbolism of mountain climbing. The slogan "On the Roof of the World" implies a service that can reach all places, a crucial message for any phone operator, while the company's directory number is also integrated into the whole play of associations that the campaign is designed to trigger.
These examples aside, however, there is a conviction among experts that business managers in general lack a clear vision of what they want to achieve through sponsoring and how that can be done.
Last week saw the launch of a campaign by CCC Polsat, the first national professional bicycling team to participate in Giro d'Italia, one of the most prestigious races in the sport. While Polsat, the owner of a sports TV channel, can obviously expect benefits, such as increasing its viewership and raising its credibility among the country's sports enthusiasts, it is less clear how cycling fits into the marketing strategies of shoe retailer CCC.
"I do not know the company's president, but I will bet you any amount of money that he used to be a cyclist," Redwan said. "There are still many sponsors who are led more by sentiment than business sense."
As it happens, Redwan's guess proved correct, and so it may be with his estimation of the company's marketing strategy.
The relatively little known brand may consider its strategy a success, if within two years the public starts to associate it with high quality shoes, he said.
Other experts agree that many projects are started without sufficient planning ahead.
"The greatest difference between this country and the western European markets is the volume of money involved in sponsoring," ARC Rynek i Opinia's Czarnecki said. "There is so much less of it over here. That is perhaps why companies do not give so much thought to how it is spent."
