Managing Your Brand In The Sponsorship Space!

Passion Drivers™ is Octagon’s ground-breaking proprietary research programme, the first study of its kind, which assesses why fans love sport, music and entertainment. The deep insight it provides into fans’ passions enables brands to get inside the hearts and minds of their consumers. This is a vast, intensive and ongoing research programme and global initiative that covers:

· 25 sports(10 different sports in US, 8 sports in China, 7 sports in UK, 7 sports in Australia and 3 sports in South Africa),

· 8 countries(the countries are the U.S., Canada, China, France, the U.K., Australia, South Africa and Germany) and

· Over 25,000 passionate fans. In the UK we have focused on music, London 2012, football, cricket, rugby, extreme sports, F1, golf and tennis.

Beyond Traditional Understanding

Today’s consumers are bombarded with messages in a cluttered, fragmented marketplace, meaning that brands need to be increasingly innovative in the way they engage with their target market. As an industry, we have quantified everything we can about fans in terms of the ‘who, what, where and when’ – but this is not enough. A genuine connection with fans is critical to the success of any sponsorship marketing programme.

This quantitative and qualitative research has identified the specific factors that define fans’ emotional connection with sport, music and entertainment. The segmentation and analysis provided, based on these different passions, enables brands to develop marketing and sponsorship programmes that resonate with their target consumers. Passion Drivers™ research programme provides unique insights into why fans love sport, music and entertainment. This knowledge of what motivates fans enables custodians and managers of managers to build truly engaging sponsorship and marketing strategies.

Furthermore, Passion Drivers® research helps marketers “think like a fan” when developing sponsorship activation strategies and programs. The research yields quantified information and insights into the emotional connections consumers have with sports to explain for the first time “why fans are fans.”

Knowing why fans feel the way they do about a particular sport enables sponsors to develop strategies that connect their brands to this emotional relationship in ways that truly influence consumers. Knowing the “why” also reveals that distinct fan types, that go deeper than demographic distinctions, exist within the fan base of a particular sport and that these fans follow sport for different reasons.

This research has produced profiles of fan types across numerous sports based upon 12 Passion Drivers® factors. One or a combination of these factors draws fans to their favourite sports.

The Passion Drivers® factors identified and described by Octagon are:

· Active appreciation: the fans’ ability to call upon personal experience playing the game now or at some point in their lives.

· All consuming: the power of the sport to draw the fan in to the point where nothing else matters while the game is being played.

· Gloating: the appeal of reveling in the agony of rival fans when their team loses.

· Personal indulgence: Sport is seen as a selfish reward — an excuse for “me time.”

· Player affinity: Fans’ interest in relating to sports stars as people.

· Player excitement: Pure hero worship and admiration for their athleticism and skills.

· Love of the game: Pure enjoyment of the sport and competition regardless of who is playing or who wins or loses.

· Nostalgia: Combines the history of the sport and personal recollections of watching the sport growing up.

· Sense of belonging: Being part of a group of like-minded fans (of the same team).

· Team devotion: Fans’ love for their team bordering on obsession and unquestioned loyalty.

· TV preference: How fans prefer to follow the sport. TV oftentimes provides a more satisfying experience than attending in person or participating.

· Talk and socializing: Sport as a topic of conversation and a means to build friendships.

The importance of these factors in terms of the degree to which they contribute to fan passion varies significantly from sport to sport. Also, Octagon has discovered that a sport’s fan base in a particular country can include fans that follow the sport for very different reasons.

More marketers are beginning to embrace the power of passion-based marketing as an effective engagement tool. Brands can show consumers they care and effectively engage them when they understand the passion target consumers have for the sport – the key emotional connections – and use this understanding to guide sponsorship strategy and activation.

When sponsors know the “why” of fan motivation, sponsorship programs can be created from the fans’ perspective. A more disciplined approach to sponsorship replaces developing strategic messages and programs based on gut instinct and what marketers believe to be true about the “typical” fan. There are many “typical” groups of fans whose passion for sport must be understood and embraced by marketers who want to maximize their sponsorships and differentiate their brands from other companies competing in the same sports space.

Passion Drivers for effective and high impact sponsorship programmes that ultimately ensure high returns of investment (ROI) in marketing spend will be conducted by Connect Marketing Services, the Octagon affiliate in West Africa.