What are the Unique Challenges You Face in Sports Marketing?

Generally, many of the most iconic consumer brands we know, have made investments in Sports and Entertainment marketing. It is challenging to build a widely-known, credible brand without attaching to consumers’ deep passion for Sports and Entertainment. Yet the challenges you face in sports marketing are unique. Traditional marketing principles must be broadened to cover the many aspects of the sports industry. While standard marketing considerations, such as product, price, place, and promotion are always at play, the business of sports also utilizes other principles, such as perception, inconsistency, perishability, and positioning. Sports industries involve a combination of products, service, and entertainment. This complexity can pose challenges for many marketing managers.

Here are a few common challenges in sports marketing.

Fan Perception

Fans can be finicky. When you are marketing a sports brand, it is easy to promote your products while the team is succeeding. The goal is to develop brand recognition that is sustained during the highs of the season as well as the lows. Sports business owners must face the challenge of an audience with an ever-changing perception of their team. To excel, marketers must engage fans both on and off the bandwagon. Ultimately, a key goal is to leverage the sizable brand equity of a sports team, league or athlete and “transfer” some of that equity to your own brand.

Inconsistency

There are many unpredictable factors in sports. These factors cause inconsistency, making it difficult to plan anything too far in advance. Teams can rarely guarantee which athletes will be playing by the end of the season. Injuries, trades, and other changes can make key promotional tools inconsistent with the current status of the team. Long term branding for marketing materials, merchandise, and other goods is often a challenge. In addition, athletes often find themselves at the center of reputation controversies that can drag sponsors and brands along for a negative ride. These are challenging risks to mitigate.

Sports marketers must be innovative with their creative to design evergreen ads and goods. Every team and situation will require a different strategy that can be tailored to your audience. These strategies often include short development turn-arounds for products and materials and intermittent roll-outs of new products.

Frequency & Activation

Many sponsors that are new to the sports marketing landscape make the mistake of spending a sizable portion of their overall budget on sponsorship fees vs. the ongoing activation of their sponsorships. As McKinsey noted in their study Is Sports Sponsorship Worth it?, “One US consumer-packaged-goods company, for example, allocated 80 percent of its sponsorship budget to rights fees and only 20 percent to activation. After analyzing its efforts, it found that increased activation resulted in greater unaided awareness and higher brand recall. With this insight, the company shifted resources from its low-performing properties to increase activation for its standout sponsorships, increasing unaided awareness of them by 15 percent.” It is critical to allocate meaningful budget to activating sponsorships with frequency across the relevant fan base. They work together to drive the awareness wins sought by brands. -Eyal Gutentag