Promotion - Sponsorship

Author: Jim Riley  Last updated: Sunday 23 September, 2012

An increasingly common form of promotional activity is sponsorship. What is sponsorship?

Sponsorship can be defined as follows:

Supporting an event, activity or organisation by providing money or other resources that is of value to the sponsored event. This is usually in return for advertising space at the event or as part of the publicity for the event.

There are many kinds of sponsorship:

• Television and radio programme sponsorship. The increasing fragmentation of television in the UK through new digital channels is providing many more opportunities for sponsorship of this kind

• Sports sponsorship: major sporting events have the advantage of being attended and (more importantly) watched by large numbers of people. They also attract significant media coverage.

• Arts sponsorship; arts events or organisations are not as well attended as sports events but are often regarded as more “worthy” and more in keeping with the image of certain businesses and brands.

• Educational sponsorship; this can take several forms from the sponsoring of individual students at college through to the provision of books and computers nationwide using the redemption of product or store-related vouchers.

What is involved in developing a sponsorship promotion?

Smith suggests a six-stage process to decide what and how to sponsor:

(1) Analyse the current situation: look at which other businesses are sponsoring in the target area. Are competitors already doing this and is it providing them with an advantage?

(2) Define the sponsorship objectives: e.g. raise awareness of the brand; build an image; promote a new product

(3) Agree the strategy: how does the sponsorship fit in with any other promotional activity?

(4) Develop the tactics: agree the details of what to sponsor, price, timing etc

(5) Define the target audience

(6) Consider what resources are needed to make the sponsorship a success.

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