What can travel brands learn from Coke’s sport sponsorship strategy?

Author: Helena Beard

I was teaching a marketing module to a group of Sports Management students last week and one of them asked me ‘Why would Coke and Pepsi spend millions of dollars advertising in the break of the Superbowl? What has Coke got to do with sport?’

It’s a perfectly reasonable question from an active young man who has probably never watched sport from a sofa with a super-sized drink and a bucket of popcorn, but it’s a debate which has been raging for decades. Is a fizzy drink sponsoring a sporting event just a bit too cynical for us to buy into?

So we started looking into Coke’s sponsorship strategy. Coke's brand is valued at $80,653m, making it the sixth most valuable brand in the world in the 2014 BrandZ report, and it throws a large proportion of its sponsorship budget at sport. Its association with the Olympics goes back to 1928, but Coke also sponsors a host of other sporting events including Wimbledon, the Football and Rugby World Cups, and sporting brands such as Adidas. Coke also takes its brand association through to its above the line executions surrounding major sporting events. Who could forget ‘Eat Football, Sleep Football, Drink Coca Cola’ introduced for Euro 96?

But the brand’s association with sport has been hugely successful. How has Coke taken an unlikely partnership and turned it into a sponsorship super-strategy?

Coke is determined to deliver marketing campaigns which underpin its core objective to promote ‘The Coke Side of Life’. The idea here being that just as Coke is part of your life, so is sport. Brand fit. Not immediately obvious, but if you have enough money to support it, it truly can work. 

Coke claims its sponsorship criteria are based around four different areas 

• Common business objectives
• Brand fit
• Value-based relationships
• Willingness to innovate

The marketing team is disciplined in pursuing partnerships which fulfil these criteria. They don’t wait for them to come to them. Thus the sports sponsorship strategy has built over time to a point where red and white logos on shirts and stadia across the world are not only accepted but expected. Apart from the obvious benefits of being associated with healthy, lifestyle activity, sport is now cooler than ever. And it’s vital to Coke that it retains its hard-fought position as ‘cooler’ than Pepsi.

I believe that the travel industry has a huge amount to learn about sponsorship. In my opinion, it’s an area of marketing that requires more strategic thought than any other element of the marketing mix but it is rarely given the focus it merits. It’s expensive and it’s hard to measure. It tends to be sporadic and opportunistic. And it’s generally reactive. If you hold any kind of marketing budget, however big or small, you will almost certainly have been targeted by someone at some point to sponsor something, be it an event, a piece of communication or your local school hockey team. It’s rare that marketers go looking for it.

Before jumping into a sponsorship deal, I would urge anyone in this position to take a look at Coke and think what the sponsorship criteria for your brand should be. Ask the right questions. Do the business objectives of the potential partner match ours? Do their brand values match ours, or can we use theirs to extend ours into an area or market we couldn’t otherwise reach? Can we learn from our partner, or benefit from the partnership in any other way? And is there an opportunity to do something different with this project? Slapping a logo on the corner of a brochure isn’t unlikely to give you a return on your investment, however small. And very importantly, do you have the resources, both staff and cash, to properly support it?

When I held the marketing budget at Virgin Holidays, I sponsored one major event per year. This was the Responsible Travel Awards at World Travel Market. I will admit that, originally, the deal was opportunistic - the grandfather rights were with First Choice but their recent purchase by TUI had left them unable to commit within the deadlines, so we stepped in. However, the pursuit of the opportunity was also highly strategic. Virgin’s commitment to responsible tourism is now well known, but, at the time, although our policies were in place, we had done little to shout about them. The opportunity to align ourselves with the two great brands of Responsible Travel and World Travel Market was not to be missed. This sponsorship deal ran for many years and was hugely successful for Virgin Holidays. It established the responsible credentials of the brand, and was underpinned by a number of other CSR initiatives over the following years.

However, it also gave us opportunities to extend the value of the sponsorship. We ran PR campaigns around it, used it in our customer comms, extended invitations to our VIPs and used it to engage our staff in our sustainability policies. Our relationship with Responsible Travel educated us and our profile at WTM benefited our commercial teams. The important thing was that we understood the potential of the sponsorship deal and we assigned extra budget and the right level of staff support and expertise to leverage it throughout the business. Thus it had energy, breadth, depth and longevity.

Sponsorship opportunities will come your way. Some will be mainstream, some will be off the wall. Think very carefully before accepting them but don’t be scared of them. Think about Coke. Handled correctly, sponsorship can generate significant returns and have a powerful effect on your brand.

Helena Beard is a brand and communications consultant, writer and lecturer, specialising in the travel industry.