Central Intelligence: Cultural Considerations for Sponsorship Buyers
Posted: 8/3/2009 9:27:29 AM by
Diane Knoepke | with 0 comments
In my last post, I shared my observations on how culture impacts—and should impact—the way sponsorship sellers create their strategies. In this post, I’m taking a look at the buyers, for whom culture is a much different thing.
Buyers
To once again oversimplify, a company’s sponsorship selection (to buy or not to buy) and evaluation (to renew or not to renew) strategy is a process that screens each opportunity against a set of criteria. Those criteria are built to measure a given opportunity’s likelihood to help the company meet its objectives. This includes opportunities where the company instigates the conversation and/or the property cold calls.
So if sponsors are (or should be) applying such objectivity and rigor to their decision-making, does “corporate culture” come in to play? Indeed, it is different than properties where the cultural filter is typically applied as a step in the strategic process. For one thing, the buyer’s culture is a big determinant of whether or not there is a formal process like the one I described above. Many sponsors globally still make decisions driven by gut, legacy buys, and seniority. And some of them earn a return on investment from those decisions (though my guess is most of them cannot prove it without pre- and post-decision processes in place).
For buyers, the culture informs and shapes the entire process. With no judgments implied, here is a partial list of factors that form and impact a company’s sponsorship culture:
- Prevalence of silos, cliques, and fiefdoms
- Whether marketing is viewed as an expense or an investment
- Whether the company is opportunity-neutral or predisposed toward a given medium or sector
- The degree to which sponsorship activation is integrated with advertising, PR, sales, and CSR efforts
- Leadership philosophy
- Degree and types of hierarchy
Certainly these factors apply to more than just sponsorship; they likely play a role in employee recruitment/retention, customer satisfaction, CSR profile and a host of other decisions and performance measures. Just another example of how sponsorship decisions should be driven by the same core brand values and strategic plans that guide the very company’s daily operation in the C-suite, the Board room and in the trenches.
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Filed under: contracts, evaluation, guidelines, how to get sponsorship, negotiating, packaging, research, selling, spending, sponsorship measurement, sponsorship ROI, activation