Ftsis 2007: Lack Of Buy-in Harming Sponsors

Sir John Hegarty, worldwide creative director of advertising agency Bartle Bogle
Hegarty, reasoned at the FT Sport Industry Summit that not enough sport
sponsoring companies have total strategic buy-in to the association across their
business.

The experienced Hegarty stated that marketers are now almost entirely focused
on integrating their strategies across all the activity that the company
undertakes – an issue that sport sponsors are still failing to grasp.

He stated: ‘There’s no doubt that sport has huge potential as a marketing
tool but the strategy has to be right and mapped out across the whole of the
sponsoring company. There’s still too many companies for whom one division gets
the strategy but the rest of the organisation are not activating it.’

The point was reinforced by Sally Hancock, director of London 2012
partnership and group sponsorship at LloydsTSB, who claimed that at the outset
of the contract, the majority of sponsorship associations are still made with
little or no objectives in mind.

Saul Pearce, vice president of marketing at Samsung Europe – a brand widely
acknowledged to be one of the best practitioners of sport sponsorship, said that
the reasoning behind its success was its internal marketing technique in getting
the whole company aligned behind the idea.