Sponsorship is the term used in marketing to represent the association of a company with a particular event or individual thus helping the company in creating or enhancing the brand of the company in the eyes of the consumers watching the event. Sponsorship is widely used in the case of sporting events where companies associate themselves with a particular team or particular individual playing in the event. In order to get a better idea about this concept, one should look at some of the pros and cons of sponsorship –
Advantages of Sponsorship
Sponsorship Creates Brand Awareness
The first and foremost advantage of sponsorship is that it helps the company in creating brand awareness of the company because sporting events are not only watched by live audiences but by also millions of viewers on live television or streaming platforms across the world hence is a good way of creating brand awareness in the eyes of not only the local audience but also international audience all over the world.
Highly Targetted Marketing
In the case of sponsorship, the company can align its brand with a sporting event or sporting personality and thus can help the company in creating a highly targeted marketing campaign that can yield greater results in terms of conversions as compared to other modes of marketing.
Improvement in Standards
Sports are something which we all love but many sports do not attract talented people due to lack of fame and money and that is where sponsorship can be of great help as once sponsors come into the picture they improve the standard of the game by ensuring that talented people get enough money and facilities which in turn will ensure that they give their best while playing the game.
Disadvantages of Sponsorship
Lack of Flexibility
The biggest disadvantage of sponsorship is that there is a lack of flexibility in this method of advertising as opposed to other methods of advertising where companies can be a lot more creative and have plenty of leeways when it comes to the content of advertisement as well as way of presenting that advertisement to the general public. Hence for example in the case of television advertising company can advertise for many days while in the case of sponsorship it will be visible until the tournament is played and after that, it cannot be used by the company.
Dependence on Others
In the case of sponsorship, the success of the sponsorship lies in how well the team or player performs, hence for example if the company has sponsored a soccer team in the world and that team due to poor performance crashes out of the world cup early in the tournament than the whole idea of sponsoring a team will be a flop not due to bad product or bad marketing campaign but due to bad performance of team or individual which the company has sponsored.
Sponsorship Leads to Increased Interference
Sponsors invest money into sports and individuals and where money is involved it automatically leads to asking for favors and if the sponsor is a big company then chances are they will interfere in the working of the team and sport by asking for favors such as scheduling the tournament according to their choice or shooting advertisements with players in the middle of the tournament and other such interferences making a sport, not a sporting event but a marketing event.
As one can see from the above that sponsorship has pros as well as cons and that is the reason why any company thinking of adopting this strategy for its products or services should carefully read the above points and then only decide whether to sponsor its products or service in events or use other methods of advertising.