March 2003   

Sponsorships: An Effective Way to Break Through The Clutter

Dynamic Logic has found through analysis of its MarketNorms database that online marketing campaigns with sponsorship elements outperform those with only standard messaging units. The data shows that consumers are increasingly able to connect the sponsorships with the appropriate brand, and those connections have positive impacts on other brand metrics, including Brand Favorability (which is a difficult metric to move).

Marketers are always looking for new and better ways to communicate with consumers. Consequently, a traditional approach to marketing is becoming more prevalent online. The sponsorship concept has been commonplace in offline marketing for decades, especially around sports related events. That idea simply entails connecting a brand with something consumers have passion for - such as a sporting events, music tours and charity functions. Dynamic Logic has recently added Sponsorship Association to its MarketNorms database and analyzed the effectiveness of these marketing efforts. A sponsorship is defined as a marketing effort where the objective is to connect a brand with a separate and identifiable event, person, place, content area or promotion. The analysis, based on over 750 campaigns, highlighted two main points.

First (see A. in graph), the sponsorship concept works very well. The Sponsorship Association metric shows a higher point increase than any other metric indicating that connections are being established between brands and the sponsored events.

Second (see B. in graph.), the sponsorship has an affect on other metrics. The chart above shows the brand metric results for campaigns that have a sponsorship component against those that do not, and across all metrics the Sponsorship campaigns outperform the others. That difference is especially pronounced in Brand Favorability, which is typically an extremely hard metric to move.