From Matches To Experiences: Brand Strategies At Sports Events
Sports events have transcended traditional viewing experiences, evolving into comprehensive, interactive spectacles that engage fans beyond the game. With the integration of activations and diverse engagement strategies, sports events offer brands a unique opportunity to enhance visibility and impact through memorable experiences. This shift towards a holistic entertainment approach not only enriches the fan experience but also maximises the return on investment for sponsors, making sports events a critical venue for innovative marketing.
Everything Experiential spoke to industry leaders who highlighted how these events serve as dynamic platforms for experiential marketing, allowing brands to connect deeply with consumers through their passions.
The evolution of consumer experiences
With big-ticket sports events such as the IPL, ICC World, Kabbadi League, Olympics, etc. needless to say, these events have evolved and continue to do so to build consumer experiences.
Rohit Raj, Senior Vice President - Brand Strategy, Dentsu Creative India points out that sports events were earlier around a singular experience, the match, however, sports organisers have realised that there needs to be an ecosystem of surrounding experiences that enrich the consumer's event experience. “They are also a lot more open to collaborating with brands a lot more and allow brands to have a more meaningful presence at sporting events beyond just mere visibility.”
As per Anil Singh, Managing Director, Procam International, sports events are the only available tool where a human being, in a matter of a two-hour match, would experience every gamut of human emotions that one is capable of, whether it's joy, elation, celebration, despair, sadness, frustration, anger, empathy etc.
He adds, “Sponsorship doesn't deliver anything unless you activate that sponsorship. That's a very important word. And globally, irrespective of the numbers, normally a brand would spend two to three times the sponsorship amount to activate.” He states the examples of Red Bull, Emirates, Etihad, Coca-Cola, Rolex, Qatar, Budweiser and even Hero MotoCorp in India who have been at this in the right manner, since many years.
ROI Through Experiential Marketing
Raj believes that experiential marketing gives brands an opportunity to talk to consumers rather than just serve ads. “Sports events allow brands to engage with consumers when they are indulging in their passion point, this allows brands to be strongly associated with that moment and drive significantly higher impact across awareness, recall, trials etc. as opposed to one-way push media.”
Singh understands that it's vital to realise that if you do not activate, the ROI will be from a branding or a brand recall point of view, not from an engagement perspective. “Apart from being seen as a brand, you're not doing anything for that audience. You're not engaging, not speaking, not diving into their psyche, you're not getting in and being able to be there for them. Only when you can do all this, do sponsorships get activated or start realising their value.”
Catering To A Diverse TA
Despite the diversity in target consumers across a country like India, sports events have been proving to be an effective ground for brands to showcase themselves from the experiential marketing point of view.
Raj, too, affirms that in today’s day and age of hyper-targeted messaging, sports events actually allow brands to communicate with a vast variety of consumers in a single place. “The key for brands is to find the sweet spot between the context of the sport, the brand’s ethos and the consumer's needs in order to bring alive the experience and make it memorable. Brands can collaborate with the organisers to build bespoke experiences basis different consumer cohorts to engage with a multitude of consumer personas.”
An All-in-one Entertainment Offering
It’s a fact that nowadays sports events are more than just that, they are about an all-in-one entertainment offering, wherein sports events and brands uniquely entice the consumers through techniques such as on-ground activations, sampling, etc. – thus, engaging with their consumers and offering memorable experiences.
Singh mentions, “A job of a sports promoter is to keep building bridges at every possible curve to accommodate people - whether they like food, music, a certain individual, whether they like the charity angle of it, or the health angle of it etc. So a brand has to build bridges or has to build different roadways and pathways that excite its consumers.”
Raj points out that for a long time, sports event attendance was male-dominated. However, in the last few years, sports event attendance has become more inclusive with friends and families also attending these events. “This gives the organisers and brands a unique opportunity to bring them closer to the sport and build engagement for the brands.
The key is to make these engagements fun, immersive and memorable. The use of interactive technology like XR, IoT etc. can amp up the experience and build greater immersion in the brand narrative, another aspect that they can leverage is community building. Collective experiences bring like-minded people together, and ensure greater memorability and recall of the engagement.”
