Sponsorship Marketing
Cover Story
Sponsorship Marketing
Carolyne Gathuru
The Imbalanced Experience Of Sponsorship Marketing
The experience contradiction at the heart of sponsorship marketing needs to be examined with the proverbial surgical table exposition. It is often called a partnership, presented as a mutually beneficial relationship and duly celebrated as a coming together of two brands with complementary objectives.
But somewhere between the signing of the sponsorship agreement and the opening of the event doors, the relationship changes character. The event owner, who has spent months and months building the property, audience, credibility and community around the event, can suddenly find themselves behaving less like a partner and more like a supplicant who should be eternally grateful that somebody brought the money.
The familiar saying,“ he who pays the piper calls the tune” is the closest description that captures the problem better than any sponsorship terminology. The sponsor provides the money, and therefore feels entitled to determine how the tune is played. Logically, a company investing significant resources into an event has legitimate expectations about visibility, brand association, return on investment, audience access and commercial value.
The problem begins when those expectations cross the line into ownership, interference and domination. What was supposed to be a partnership becomes a relationship in which one party provides the money and the other is expected to surrender the steering wheel.
For event organizers, this goes beyond being just an inconvenient commercial arrangement, but becomes an exhausting experience that is emotional, physical, psychological and sometimes financiallydamaging. What is seen at the front end is
14 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE the polished sponsorship proposal and the smiling photos of executives on podium.
What’ s back stage though … trauma, trauma, and more trauma dressed up as: teams working late into the night to accomodate last-minute sponsor demands, organizers chasing invoices long after the event has happened, potential partners being turned away because of exclusivity clauses, uninspiring sponsor speakers being imposed on audiences, and event teams running around trying to satisfy mutating instructions from multiple departments within the sponsoring organisation.
Meanwhile, the people who created the event feel as though they have somehow become oppressed staff in a company they do not directly work for.
Event owners spend considerable amounts of time in the creation process, building the concept, establishing the audience, developing relationships, creating trust and investing in the infrastructure required to bring people together. Sponsorship marketing does bring the money yes, but there’ s the whole iceberg underneath that’ s the actual value around which the sponsor wishes to associate itself.
One manifestation of the imbalance is often seen in branding, where the sponsor wants their logo absolutely everywhere. Visibility on the backdrop, stage, tickets, social media, advertising, merchandise, digital platforms and even the event architecture. Where though is the line between visibility and brand occupation? Oftentimes sponsor identity overwhelms the identity of the event with demands of“ The ABC XYZ Event”, in place of“ The XYZ Event, sponsored by ABC”, effectively rendering the event an extension of the sponsor ' s own marketing campaign. The sponsor becomes so dominant that attendees feel they have walked into a corporate activation disguised as an event and they for sure did not necessarily sign up to consume overwhelming brand messaging... they came for the event.
What becomes even more pronounced is when the sponsor ' s brand team starts assuming operational control. Because they have“ brought in the bag”, they begin to behave as though they have acquired the right to run the show their way. Suddenly the sponsor wants to determine who goes on stage, what is said, how the programme flows, what the stage looks like, what the MC says or doesn’ t, where people sit, which partners appear, how the audience is engaged and the works! Decisions that should have been jointly agreed at the partnership-design stage become instructions issued from one to another with the expectation of instant compliance.
The organizer is accountable for the event, but increasingly has less control over the decisions that determine whether the event actually works. The sponsors many times sit in meetings and make demands, while the organizer’ s team is left to figure out how to make those demands physically, financially and logistically possible. By event day, the sponsor ' s executives sit comfortably in VIP areas while the event owner ' s team is running around like headless chickens trying to make sense of a programme that has been altered repeatedly.
Now let’ s head on to the elephant in the event room, where sponsors understandably want their leaders to have visibility with a senior executive on stage providing prestige and demonstrating commitment. Where this all starts to fall apart is that many times the designated speakers use the opportunity to deliver extended sales pitches to an audience that came for an entirely different