In Depth
NFL Canada’s Sales Strategy Demonstrates How To Overcome Limited Assets
Keys to property’s sponsorship success are targeting prospects by brand fit, not demographic match, and making objectives and activation ideas the focus of sales calls.
6/11/07: From the way it targets potential sponsor candidates to its creative development of marketable benefits, NFL Canada’s outlook on how to sell sponsorship differs markedly from many other properties.
Given the success the organization has had, other rightsholders, especially those that do not own or control many traditional assets, may want to adopt its approach.
At first glance, smaller properties may not see much relevance in ideas generated by an affiliate of one of the largest and most successful sponsorship properties in the world. However, the reality for NFL Canada–a 10-year-old division of NFL Int’l responsible for marketing the league and handling its business interests in Canada–is that beyond league and team trademarks and limited tickets for events such as the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl, its list of assets is not long.
It has no games, stadiums, player rights or broadcast inventory to offer its sponsors. In addition, it must compete for attention and sponsor support with the Canadian Football League.
Despite those challenges, NFL Canada has been able to secure eight figures in sponsorship revenue from 22 partners. Below, in excerpted remarks from his workshop at IEG’s The Next Big Thing conference, Dan Quinn, managing director of NFL Canada, shares his property’s successful sales strategy, beginning with its unique way of identifying its most likely prospects and then discussing the dialogue it has with sponsors.
Defining Fit By Brand Alignment, Not Demographics
The first thing we do is try to establish a brand fit. Our focus is not on demographics, they mean nothing.
If a company says its demographics match up with your property, it should go buy TV time during your broadcast. What you really want is a sponsor whose brand aligns with yours, because only then can you start to develop the relationship and move forward.
What we define as brand alignment is made up of three components: brand position, brand character and the marketing theme. Your challenge is to find a link between your property and your partners in at least one of those areas. If just one of them fits, you have the opportunity to start doing business.
Brand position. Your brand position is really the promise that you make to consumers. It is also the business that you are in.
Our brand position is this: “The NFL in Canada is the ultimate social experience brand that consistently brings people together, connecting them socially and emotionally, by creating a strong sense of belonging between fans, the game and their teams.”
That is why Budweiser is a sponsor of the NFL in Canada–there is a brand fit around the position of providing social experiences. But if we look at Budweiser through a demographic lens, you would say they shouldn’t be with us because our target audiences don’t match up at all. In Canada, Budweiser’s target audience is legal drinking age to 24. Our audience is 25 to 54 with a bull’s-eye on 32.
Brand character. Your brand character is three to five words that your audience would use to describe your organization if it was an actual person. For the NFL, research shows that Canadians say we are “strong,” a “leader,” and an “innovator.”
Our brand character is what aligns us with a partner such as Black & Decker. That sponsor clearly does not match up with our brand position of social experiences, but the attributes of strength and leadership are qualities that Black & Decker is also associated with, so we still have a strong alignment.
Marketing theme. This is your brand message. Typically, if there is alignment in one of the other two areas, there also will be alignment with the marketing theme. In other instances, your theme may be very close to a company’s own messaging, thus forming the main basis for the alignment.
The great thing about matching up sponsors with your marketing theme is that they will actually go to market and deliver your message for you, relieving you of having to spend a lot of money on marketing. This is where sponsor activation provides a win for them and a win for you, and why it is so important that you provide your partners with an activation roadmap.
Our current marketing theme is “Who’s Your Team?” because through our market research we found that the people who were most passionate about our game were those who followed a specific team. With this as our theme, not only could we reach our most dedicated fans, but we could also get more casual fans interested in following a team and thus raise their passion level.
Strategic Positioning: Demonstrating Impact On Sponsors’ Sales
Once you know you are talking to a company that can benefit from a partnership with you because of brand alignment, you can move on to the most important part of securing sponsorship: strategic positioning.
Strategic positioning means showing a prospective sponsor how being associated with your property can increase their sales. If you can’t do that, odds are they probably won’t become a partner.
Our conversation with prospects begins with a chart that lays out what we believe are the six marketing objectives that every company has, whether they are a local convenience store or a multinational. They are: sales objectives, business-to-business objectives, corporate awareness objectives, block (defensive) marketing objectives, employee motivation objectives and image enhancement objectives.
The emphasis companies place on each, and the strategies and tactics they use to accomplish them are different, of course, but overall those are the universal objectives that we have used to establish both $5,000 and multimillion-dollar deals.
We have done entire sales presentations off of nothing but a chart with the six objectives on it. The greatest way to get your prospects talking is to ask questions about each objective, such as “What do you do to increase sales?”
They will start to tell you about consumer promotions they have run, how they incent their sales staff, etc. We will ask further questions, such as “Tell us the best program you’ve done in that regard. Tell us the worst one.” Then we move to the next objective: “What do you do to reinforce your relationships with your key business partners?”
Once we have gone through all six objectives, we start over, this time with an NFL theme. “How would you do it if you were a sponsor of the NFL?” When they answer, they are writing their own proposal. They are getting an idea of how to activate, and we give them examples and ideas as we walk through it.
In my years of experience, this process has been the key to forging sponsorships and I believe all properties can use it to be successful.
Developing Ideas And Assets To Deliver Against The Six Objectives
When you are looking at building a strategic program that meets sponsors’ objectives, you have to provide them with the tools they will need to put that program together.
If you don’t have things such as tickets, broadcast inventory and signage, you have to provide other assets that sponsors can leverage against. In our case, to help sponsors achieve each of the six objectives, we have had to become creative to build those tools.
Sales objectives. Without tickets, we have to look for other ways that sponsors can provide value to consumers for sales-driven promotions. One way we do that is to help facilitate cross-promotions.
A large percentage of the promotions our sponsors run involve two or more partners. To help foster this type of cooperation, we sit down with each partner and present them with a list of all the other partners. We ask them to categorize each of the other sponsors as either a company that could provide prizes for promotions; a company that could help extend the reach of a program; or as a company they are not interested in working with.
We then contact each partner and let them know who is interested in working with them and what those interested companies are willing to offer in return for participation in a promotion.
In general, you want to be viewed by sponsors not just as an organization that sold them a sponsorship, but as an organization that helps them build their business. It was a big step when Pepsi came to us and said, “We have an open promotional window and we’d like your advice on what we can do with it.” That took us from sponsorship to partnership with them.
Business-to-business objectives. Without our own stadiums, suites and games and a limited number of Super Bowl and Pro Bowl tickets, we have had to develop assets that let our sponsors take advantage of client entertainment opportunities.
We now offer NFL Road Trips to games in border markets such as Buffalo, Green Bay and Seattle. We organize buses, game tickets, memorabilia and a tailgate party so that our partners can purchase turnkey hospitality packages.
Last season, enough partners took advantage of this opportunity that we sent 32 buses to a game in Buffalo.
It was important for us to make the investment in this program so that our partners would have an asset that many of them say is crucial for helping build their relationships with retailers and other key customers.
In addition, to bolster our “Who’s Your Team” message, we worked through the league office in New York to secure tickets for games at every NFL stadium and we said to our partners, “Go to your key contacts and decision-makers at your best customers or retailers and ask them who their favorite team is,” and we let them know that we had tickets available for every team.
Corporate awareness objectives. Just because we don’t have stadium signage does not mean we can’t deliver awareness. In fact, we and every other property can provide something even more valuable: awareness through authentic communications.
In talking with our partners, they identified one of their challenges as being able to reach NFL fans in Canada, because they did not know who or where they were. Through our online merchandise sales and other programs, we have a database that can be used to access those fans and we have put more effort into developing that database to make it more valuable for our partners.
One of the ways we do that is to strike the following deal with every partner that wants to use the database: First, we encourage them to include lead-generating promotions as part of their sponsorship activation, and then we grant access to our database only if they provide us with the contact data they capture.
The first time we did this, with Sony PlayStation, we were able to add 3,000 names to our database that Sony had collected. We are now up to 500,000 names, so we can say to a partner concerned with awareness that we will send an email blast to half a million dedicated NFL fans any time it wants to do a promotion.
In addition, we can geo-target if a company only wants to do something in Saskatchewan, or some other market. Building a useable database is something any property can and should do.
Block marketing objectives. Every company wants to block out its competition.
This can be a challenge for our partners because every company wants to be part of the Super Bowl. To protect our sponsors’ investments, we do everything we can to protect their rights from being ambushed.
This includes providing letters to sales reps of partners such as Budweiser and Hitachi that spell out for their retail accounts the potential legal ramifications of working with a competitor that tries to bring them a Super Bowl promotion.
Employee motivation objectives. Assisting sponsors with achieving this goal is very valuable for properties because if you create a program that employees love and want to participate in again and again, you have almost guaranteed that the company will re-sign when its contract is up for renewal.
Employee programs have been some of my favorites because they can be done using almost no inventory other than marks and logos and with minimal additional investment on the sponsor’s part.
For example, we designed a program for a sponsor that was experiencing serious workforce morale problems.
We came up with an idea that the company should form 11-person teams–the same number of players who are on the field for an NFL team–that each included employees from different parts of the company. Each team then chose an NFL team name for their group.
The company then devised a points program based on each team member achieving monthly performance goals. Just as in football scoring, employees could tally six points, three points or one point depending on how well they met their goals. Team members’ points were combined and at the end of the year the members of the winning team would earn a trip to the Super Bowl.
The result was that you now had finance people encouraging and helping sales people to close a deal, or a salesperson making sure an HR person filed a report on time, all so that their team would earn those six points.
The partner told us the transformation was immediate and that the program was the best one it had ever conducted.
Image enhancement objective. Because this can be an important objective for many partners, we want to be able to go beyond the image enhancement that they can achieve by associating with our brand character attributes. The primary way we have done that is by developing cause-related or similar feel-good programs for our sponsors.
A great indicator of the type of program that will resonate with a partner is the company’s marketing theme or tagline. For example, Hitachi’s tagline was “Inspire the Next.” We built on that to create an awards program for high school coaches who had changed the lives of their players.
We solicited nominations from university football players across Canada and received some unbelievable, tear-jerking stories. Hitachi received great PR from it and was thrilled that it linked back to their marketing theme.
Sources
NFL Canada, Tel: 416/322-0280