Exploiting the opportunities afforded by sponsorship to give the best possible ROI, and effectively manage the customer journey.
A company usually has a clear idea of who it is targeting with its marketing communication, and has a range of tried and trusted tools at its disposal to help influence its customers’ thinking - and, hopefully, their purchasing decisions.
Sponsorship, on the other hand, needs to contend with a rather less certain view of the market landscape. The link between sponsorship expenditure and sales revenue is not always that obvious, and the customer journey not always that easy to manage.
One of the world’s largest business software companies, SAP, invests substantially in the global sports sector. Their principal sponsorship properties exist in F1 (Vodafone McLaren Mercedes), golf (Ernie Els and Gary Player) and tennis (Andy Roddick), with several tactical activities also being covered – such as soccer and the Euro 2008 competition. The net result is a regular, worldwide exposure to the SAP brand and an opportunity to establish and reinforce the firm’s credentials with an often disparate range of audiences.
Working in conjunction with another sponsorship and hospitality agency, our task has been to help SAP in exploiting those opportunities.