Sports sponsorships--perhaps not a waste of money

Sponsoring sporting events or teams has always to me seemed more of a CEO ego trip than a serious marketing program. When my wife's old company, Alltel, rented a corporate hospitality box at the BellSouth Classic golf tournament in Atlanta, they had to recruit company spouses (like me and my friend Steve) to fill box space on the weekdays. Great for me and Steve, but great for Alltel? Didn't seem so.

In the September Harvard Business Review, Professors Stephen A. Greyser (Harvard Business School emeritus) and Francis Farrelly of Monash University in Australia argue that sponsoring sporting events has a distinct value for internal marketing--that is, building company identity and culture and enhancing morale (free link). Farrelly and Greyser write:

The French banks BNP and Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Paribas) used sponsorship of the French Tennis Federation as a unifying element in employee communications to promote acceptance of their postmerger identity and to describe the new company’s future direction. Indeed, the logo and livery of the merged bank were launched primarily through the association with tennis; tennis merchandise and posters of tennis events were distributed widely through the combined network of branches. Moreover, rather than sponsoring just the French Open at Roland Garros, the new organization, operating as BNP Paribas, worked with the tennis federation to develop other events, including a masters competition, that would create further opportunities to engage with staff members around the sponsorship throughout the year. The resulting media exposure and the sponsorship’s internal presence inspired many employees to embrace the new identity.

These stories sound entirely plausible; yet I wonder whether there's any measurement of the value of these investments. I'm skeptical that cold, rational evaluation would demonstrate that large sponsorship investments pay off. Marketers, if you have that data, I'd like to see it.

Giving away logoed merchandise reminds me of another story from the Alltel days (I worked there once, too). Each time morale seemed to slip a little, which was more than a few times, we would arrive in the morning to find a piece of clothing decorated with the Alltel logo on our chairs. I don't know if it helped morale, but I didn't have to buy a polo shirt for quite a while.

(Photo: Manchester United players by AtilaTheHun via Flickr Creative Commons. AIG pays more than $20MM per year to get its logo on Manchester United's jerseys.)

marketing sports sponsorship morale communication Harvard Business Review

PGA Tour has lost its sense...of branding

Sports marketing has been careening toward the cliff of excess for some time now (the wall-to-wall corporate sponsorship depicted in "Talladega Nights" was more verisimilitude than parody). But the recent revolving door of sponsor-named events in the US PGA golf tour is seriously damaging the history and heritage of US professional golf.

The latest example is something called the PODS Championship, held this past weekend in Florida. (PODS stands for Portable On-Demand Storage, in the form of a shipping container that this company drops in your front yard for you to fill with stuff, where it sits till your house project is done, much to the delight of your neighbors.)

The PODS Championship used to be the Chrysler Championship, and was held in the fall, not in early March. It's always been in the Tampa area, but you wouldn't know that from any of the communication surrounding the event. In fact, for all I knew (and I'm a golf fan!), this was a brand-spanking new event.

I could have said the same thing about the Wachovia Championship, the Fry's Electronics Open, the Buick Classic, the Buick Open or the Buick Invitational, not to mention the late, great 84 Lumber Classic. (Some of these were events with history, and some were new. See if you can guess which!)

What ever happened to the Westchester Classic, the Western Open, or the Firestone Tournament of Champions? At least AT&T was smart enough to retain part of the historical name of its tournament (the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am).

Exclusive naming rights bring tens of millions of dollars yearly to the PGA Tour, helping purses to grow tenfold between 1986 and 2006, according to GolfWorld. But at some point they'll be ruing the day the good old Greater Hartford Open became the Travelers.

branding, marketing, sponsorship, sports