I'm big and powerful part 2

In part 1 I talked about sponsorship's six levels of I'm big and powerful. Which sounds like an internal IMG training mantra - but isn't.

Inspired by that, I wanted to take a look at: the Three winning ways to relate to your sponsorship.

The first, 'proud sponsor', is a humble inoffensive role. 'We're sensitive to the fact that we're a mere sponsor, and potentially an uninvited guest for the average fan.'

And a cop-out, albeit a humble, inoffensive cop-out. We believe in our sponsorship but don't feel it appropriate to step into the limelight. We clearly aren't that interesting, don't really have anything to say and lack the confidence to expose ourselves any more. We're too nervous to express publicly how we relate as a business to something from outside of our comfort zone, so we won't. From a corp comms POV, it's strictly bunker mentality: head down and wait for the dust to settle.

This position can of course be nuanced with humour. Carlsberg are proud sponsors, but probably the best proud sponsors in the world. Humour of course isn't without risk, as anyone remembering Budweiser's 2006 World Cup campaign will agree. You bring the football and we'll bring an attempt at self-parody that failed to convince that it was.

Understatement can of course be turned around to genuine modesty by brands which are clearly indispensable to event functioning - such as Avaya or IBM. But only in the case of those brands who understand that product and service integration into the property is a good starting point.
The Big Simple Business Metaphor is another popular route, number two.

We're fleet of foot, agile, responsive and a great team player - in the case of football sponsor. Oh, and F1, rugby, tennis, athletics, basketball, pretty much everything but chess, to be honest.
Again, business analogy comes in different sizes.

ING was doing a good job of its sponsorship of F1 simply by demonstrating such palpable enthusiasm. Who wouldn't want to do business with a company that is prepared to be enthusiastic? What other banks show enthusiasm, for god's sake?

'Precision, sensitivity, control and responsiveness… all skills required to compete and succeed at the top of women’s tennis and women's real life.' Unmistakably Whirlpool. Think about it long enough and the machines themselves start to flit across the court to the delight of the crowd.

It can all go awry when the BSBM is word-smiff'd. Did RBS Make it happen with Williams? What did its B2B guests really think faced with that unlikely pairing of post Nike positivism and long odds. We bet hopefully on outsiders? (In retrospect, pure prescience, of course - or an insight into corporate unconsciousness, a Freudian revelation of the RBS shadow.)

Thanks heavens then for Accenture - or Mark Ritson's thesis would be harder to rebut. A company that can legitimately argue that its brand essence, or at least a prime purchase driver, is embodied in Tiger Woods' perennial high performance, a true marriage of brand and property proposition. I wonder what they'll do next.

Is a perfect marriage so hard to find? It depends on your ambition, I suppose. Ultimate high performance metaphors ARE hard to find. But if we take Martin Sorrell's point about brands needing to own single big ideas, there's plenty of scope. Marmite would naturally have sponsored Mourinho. Okay, impractical, but the League Managers Association might not be.

The point is about self-definition and the eternal tension for brands represented by Marmite. Am I prepared to stand for something in consumers' minds, knowing that not everyone will like me?

I'm big and powerful

Earlydoors thinking about how sponsorship affected consumer brand perception was based on the clunky term 'brand value transfer'. The assumption was the values of the sponsorship property would rub off on the brand, a little like someone else's dandruff on the tube, I guess.

It's obvious from practise in the field that our understanding, with lego-like subtlety, has evolved - even if it's rarely articulated. But it's still painfully the case that many big brand sponsors really only succeed in communicating one brand take-out with their sponsorship: I'm big and powerful.

I'm fine with that in the case of Vodafone, who proactively change their sponsorships to reflect their desire to be number one in red. This is conscious, self-aware and thought-through - and every category needs a leader. And for some industries, there are still arguable benefits in being seen as the biggest and most powerful. Even if that list is shrinking.

But other brands seem to act from a place of brand myopia - a 1970's mindset that if I don't act like a brand, people won't notice. To Mark Ritson's point about the dumbness of big brand sponsorship of big ticket properties, there are several possible consumer take-outs.

Firstly, no matter how cleverly you might argue the B2B relevance of your sponsorship, consumers - actual people - will still draw their own conclusions - with varying levels of sophistication.

1: obviously, this is a big and powerful brand.
2: this brand is very profitable.
3: this brand is profligate and associates itself with large properties without any obvious need to explain why.
4: this brand doesn't actually have a lot to say about itself.
5: the brand doesn't really understand consumers.
6: the governance of this business is poor.

If you sponsor a big property and don't sizeably or noticeably do something with it, you are, by default, communicating one of the above - not necessarily the first.

In praise of scientific method

"The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate."

- Francis Bacon, 'Novum Organum', 1620

Francis Bacon published 'Novum Organum' in 1620, it took 150 years for the Western scientific community to appreciate and implement its key lesson, the relative roles of inductive and deductive processes; it is taking the marketing and sponsorship industries longer still.

Without digressing too far into the abstract, and with apologies to any learned scientific historians; the scientific method proposed in Novum Organum is a challenge to the Aristotelian method of deductive reasoning, building logical arguments based on base assumptions; and a manifesto for a new method based on observation and inductive reasoning, using acquired evidence to test a proposed hypothesis.

To extend the reference to sponsorship;

The belief that media exposure, opportunities to see, or awareness of a particular campaign delivers value to a sponsoring party is based on deductive reasoning.
We assume that the creation of an association delivers a value to a sponsoring brand.
We assume that exposure to a message translates into acceptance.
This is not the time to challenge those assumptions, though they're certainly worth returning to in a later article, but to demonstrate the reliance of such methodologies on arbitrary assumptions.

This approach leads inevitably to the mundane ('please tell me how appropriate this sponsorship is'), the fantastic ('a UK media reach of 1 billion people'), and the outright leading ('do you believe sponsors would benefit from linking their advertising and promotions with Olympic ideals').

An inductive approach seeks to test the hypothesis that sponsorship has impacted on business return, not simply to prove it.
i.e. by identifying the measures that would be impacted if the hypothesis were true:

• higher levels of consideration amongst those exposed to a particular activation, when correlating factors have been accounted for
• changes in key brand metrics that mirror activation activity
• cut-through of specific sponsorship messages, and so on

Identifying these measures in advance and setting specific success criteria allows us to have confidence in both the efficacy of the methodology and the accuracy of the results.

In essence it is a new mentality. The confidence to treat evaluation not as a tool to justify investment but rather one to prove our worth.

"A word on our sponsors"

Comment from Shaun Whatling on Mark Ritson's piece last week "A word on our sponsors":

Mark Ritson's got a point of course. I just wish he could have aimed it better.

He's right to call out the many big ticket sponsorships which totally fail to deliver against ROI (without the convenient myth of AEV, that is).

And he's right, yes, big companies which don't sweat the details will find the rhetoric of the sponsorship sales boys reassuringly compelling: sign on the dotted for global brand awareness and a worldwide audience of fanatically appreciative fans (all responding positively to the question: are you pleased brand X is spending its marketing budget sponsoring this event?).

We welcome Mark's scepticism. As a business, Redmandarin has saved clients literally tens of millons of pounds - behind the scenes - advising them how to discern measurable business value amidst the spurious claims of glossy sales decks offering, often, big, dumb sponsorship.

But he's woefully off piste to denigrate sponsorship per se. His simplistic characterisation of sponsorship as an 'i-pay-you-a-hefty-wedge-and-get-to-stick-my-logo-on-your-shirt' is anachronistic and he should really do a bit more prepping before his next class.

No matter how cleverly our associate professor of marketing has 'run the numbers', I'm pretty sure he won't have done it better than Coke or McDonalds. Or Samsung. Or us.

And instead of looking at the list of 2012 sponsors, as Mark suggests, take a look at Interbrand's top consumer-facing brands - and consider the role of sponsorship in shaping brand perception and supporting business growth.

The point is not about a simple correlation between bad business and sponsorship: the point is that far too many businesses fail to approach sponsorship intelligently.