Sponsorship

Definition: ‘Contribution (financial or in-kind) to an activity (often a sport, music or arts event) by an organisation usually in exchange for name, brand or product exposure’

(Masterman & Wood, Innovative marketing communication (2006), pg 76)

‘The objective is to reach out to the local community that provides the organisation with its employees...it’s immediate operating environment represents a number of key local stakeholders and sponsorship can help to reach out to those groups’              

‘Event sponsorship is now used to drive sales as well as develop favourable brand associations and awareness, promote corporate awareness and develop internal and community relations’

3 key factors for sponsors in making sponsorship successful:

1.      The necessity to exploit event rights

2.      Role sponsorship needs to play in integrated marketing communications

3.      The need for sponsors to evaluate sponsorship in order to improve future performance.

Examples of sponsorship objectives:

-direct sales development (driving of sales)

-brand awareness

-external corporate awareness development (seeking to position or re-position themselves corporately)

-internal relations development (can create goodwill via an involvement with the employee’s community)

-competitive advantage

(Masterman & Wood, Innovative marketing communications (2006), Chapter 12)

National Wedding Show

From the website they don’t seem to have any official sponsors, I have currently emailed a section of the company to figure out who may sponsor the event but in all honesty I doubt they will get back to me in time.

As for them not seeming to have any sponsors I don’t believe they would need sponsors as they have income from people occupying the exhibition stalls. As for giveaways for the event it is assumed that these stalls will be giving away free items to promote their business which in turn provides incentives for people to receive free things. These exhibitors do play a similar role a sponsor would do, this includes trying to attract new customers, try to build a relationship with the national wedding show to get an exhibition space for the following year and an obvious objective would be to increase sales.

On their official website they do promote links to other website.

These links are for photography companies, a wedding magazine and a hotel company. All do link to the wedding aspects but they must at least get something from these organisations by advertising on their website as this would attract clients for the wedding show to visit these websites.

Sherlock Holmes

Unlike the national wedding show that the sponsors are not visibly seen, the official Sherlock Holmes page for A Game Of Shadows has a page dedicated to their partners. These partners include French Connection, English Tea Store, Hershey’s chocolate, Shuttle computer, DELTA and Hardee’s. Warner brothers play a big part in the development of the movie so they can be seen as the main sponsor of the movie, which is always displayed on any kind of advertisements and the credits at the end of the movies.

As a partner of Sherlock Holmes the website also provides links to visit the official pages of these partners, I personally did not know these companies were associated with the Sherlock Holmes franchise.

In terms of sponsorship techniques both events are completely different, movies rely on the income for organisations to actually fund the making of the movie and the national wedding show have people approach them to pay to be part of the event.

Phew I am finally done with all the postings to my blog. I’ll have blog another post that will be totally random so keep an eye out for that. I’ll make changes to some posts, like actually try to print screen the pages of the links on some posts so bare with me.....

Thanks for reading my analysis of the events. A bit boring but it had to be done....

Till next time lovely’s x