One of the keys to success in marketing a business is to expose the businesses’ name and logo and make as many impressions on people as the budget allows. If you’re a big national or regional company and can afford it, plastering your name and logo all over a sports stadium or indoor arena is a surefire way to make eyeballs take notice. There are tens of thousands of impressions to be made at each sporting event, not to mention hundreds of thousands more every time an in-park company name and logo is captured by television cameras.
For example, as we watch baseball or football in a stadium or on TV, we see dozens of logos and learn about business/team relationships. The official airline: they provide private planes for the team to travel on, gratis. There are 26 road trips. One or two could be provided by the “official motor coach” provider. Let”™s talk about the “official hot dog,” provided free to the concessionaire, all season-long. For you, $6.70 (last season at Citi Field). Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs (so New York) is a Smithfield brand.
Smithfield Foods was founded in 1938 in Virginia but in 2013 was purchased by the Chinese company WH Group for $4.7 billion. The WH Group is headquartered about as far away as you can get from Coney Island, Citi Field or Yankee Stadium but their marketing expertise realizes the importance of having a high-visibility presence for its major brand names in those places and more like them. I don’t think you’ll ever hear a vendor at a ball park shouting, “Get your WH Group hot dogs.”
Sponsorships, you see, are high visibility stuff and come with way more advertising reach and frequency than most marketers imagine. You have no idea how many brand categories comprise the official ones for Major League Baseball (MLB) teams (even encouraging enough marketing brilliance to create disposable baby diapers with logo imprints). We”™ll stay out of the licensing aspects of these deals, but with 162 games, MLB and their clubs”™ counsel spend the off-season poring over contracts for these sponsorships and licensing arrangements.
While the major leagues may be a bit too pricey for local businesses, minor league baseball offers a presence in numerous communities and can attract just as much fan loyalty and community appreciation as the majors. Unlike the Mets and Yankees, wallets are not clobbered and many folks like the novelty of minor league game attendance. That novelty adds up to fewer crowds to navigate, more time to schmooze and every sponsorship package perk you can imagine. It”™s a kind of Light Baseball, but can produce heavy results.
If not a season-long deal for a stadium or arena billboard, there are many individual events that will take you on as a sponsor, but the reality is you need to carefully examine every facet of the deliverables and outreach they provide. Ask questions about every line item of a prospective deal to make sure you’ll get what you thought.
Associating with an individual event can be better and not merely because the price would be lower. The event itself could become your own proprietary event. Proprietary in “marketing speak” means unique to you and likely not copied (or even attended) by your competitors. You own this approach. You cover the site, maybe a tent outdoors, parking, the potties (bathrooms are really important with events), the program (aka “run of show”), the food, the beverages, transportation options to and from, the swag or goody bag (give people something to remember you by) and you must have a vision, a concept and a “hook.”
Your event can be small group, like a customer team; larger like a golf tournament to benefit a community nonprofit where you become associated with a cause that could really use your help. The latter is what we used to call “co-marketing,” and it is the best way to make budgets work better as there are two entities conjoined street-facing, vs. one trying to do everything alone. That dynamic has a lot of moving parts, but is a pure symphony to all ears once blissfully executed. And, when there’s a successful relationship with an admired nonprofit there’s zero backlash.
Of course, you want to know whatever it’s possible to know about an association including doing some crystal ball gazing to anticipate and dodge possible controversy. Bud Light, an Anheuser Busch brand, has gotten nuclear heat for sponsorship of a transgender persona on their cans. Restaurant/bar as well as retail sales were off in some markets by 50%, bringing national volume down 21% and boosting competitors market share big time. In theory, noble inclusivity; in reality, a deadly marketing mistake.
