Do All Brands Need To Change Messaging In Activating Sports Sponsorship?
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Will fans return to venues when sports resumes? A recent Momentum Worldwide survey found, “that nearly two-thirds of [sports fans] would go to a live sporting event as soon as they resume from the Covid-19 pandemic and fans are allowed to go.” However, a recent Seton Hall University poll found that “most fans will stay away from all sports venues until there is a vaccine developed for the virus.”
We have talked in past posts about the challenges with surveys that are highlighted by the divergent results to seemingly the same question and respondent types. The more important thing in this instance, however, is arguably what these surveys have in common. They both are trying to understand how fans will engage with sports going forward, which is critical to the industry’s future success.
This is particularly important for sports sponsorship given that consumers are seemingly looking to engage with companies in new ways. Momentum Worldwide president and chief marketing officer Kevin McNulty stated, “It’s no longer about a particular product benefit, but rather something bigger and what role can these brands play in the fans’ lives.”
McNulty’s point-of-view reflects a consensus about how brands should interact with customers during the coronavirus pandemic as reflected in a recent Harvard Business Review post. This would mean that sports properties would benefit from changing how they activate sponsorships.
The problem is that this may not be true or at least true in all forms of advertising. More specifically, sports properties may be better suited talking to the interests of sports fans rather than communicating “something bigger.”
How did we come to this conclusion? A recent Front Office Sports post highlighted the success of the Ironman Group’s Virtual Racing series that launched at the beginning of April. In particular, Ironman was able to successfully integrate sponsors into these races such as shoe brand HOKA ONE ONE. Why were the virtual races “a very important series to HOKA?”
HOKA ONE ONE global director of sports marketing Mike McManus stated, “Our brand is a very young brand. We’re a decade old, so I would say in some cases, the Ironman brand awareness itself is greater than Hoka One One. And so first and foremost [we get] brand awareness. Triathletes found Hoka before Hoka started to invest in triathletes. We have the opportunity to connect with all those consumers. We also can, through our athletes, offer advice and training programs, so through social media, through these virtual races, we now have a platform that we can continually speak to and connect with our consumers.”
The benefits that HOKA is generating through the partnership with Ironman now sounds similar to how partnerships were delivering value to companies before the coronavirus pandemic. More specifically, brands are able to engage with customers (in this case new customers) in ways they could not achieve on their own.
The Block Six Analytics Audience Inference Platform (AIP) helps to prove this point. AIP uses natural language processing (NLP) to determine the keywords that followers of an account disproportionally talk about in organic posts on Twitter. In this case, we examined posts from the followers of the @IRONMANLive account for posts both relating and non-relating to Ironman.
Detailed below are the top results for English-language keywords from this analysis. The higher the score means the more @IRONMANLive uses this word in posts as compared to the base population.
1. swam 0.15534763628407888
2. calorie 0.12600566097496155
3. miler 0.1234724797463191
4. nike 0.12304098600833965
5. pour 0.12078667130519621
6. badge 0.12074388658703902
7. strava 0.10934255425057812
8. physio 0.1091274546773608
9. brownlee 0.10867712935361662
10. dublin 0.10817447815441267
11. diary 0.10624855893996926
12. leeds 0.10555703538923028
13. noch 0.10428254283324837
14. murphy 0.10419848343463593
15. ontario 0.10122123725681287
16. labour 0.09951423729111873
17. altitude 0.09917531554502701
18. triathlon 0.09827232369913591
19. completed 0.09746966002115486
20. brexit 0.09514733065926549
21. ironman 0.0945858100557841
22. lockdown 0.0936859841587043
AIP showed that the first coronavirus related topic with “lockdown” was the 22nd highest rated keyword. This means that @IRONMANLive followers are more focused on performance / competitive topics than on the coronavirus based on what they are saying. For HOKA, talking about the ways in which shoes can help with their performance (i.e. product benefits) would likely resonate more than “something bigger.”
These results demonstrate the importance of looking at organic conversation rather than survey data. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic will lead to a significant amount of response bias in surveys. This means that respondents will state what they think they should say / what a surveyor wants to hear rather than articulating their true beliefs. Therefore, it makes complete sense that respondents would say they want brands to communicate “something bigger” even if that may not really be the case.
That does not mean brands should go in the opposite direction of solely communicating product benefits. @IRONMANLive is only one example and its followers are not necessarily reflective of all sports audiences.
However, this type of analysis is a feature of AIP and machine learning more generally as compared to survey work. We can examine what the followers of multiple sports accounts are saying and determine the best way to communicate with each audience based on their organic conversations.