Corporate Branding Through Sports

According to Entrepreneur.com, branding is “the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol, or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.”  Sports offer a platform for many major corporations and businesses to attempt to brand themselves.  Every year corporations and businesses big and small spend totals of billions dollars on advertising and marketing in sports.  Aligning the brands of corporations with the brands of different sports properties is a science in its own right.  Why do businesses spend millions of dollars on sports marketing?  When brands are well known, why do they have to spend any marketing dollars at all?  The reason is branding because a strategic branding campaign can make or break a business in this ultra-competitive world.  To me, the success of a branding campaign relies heavily on three things: know the customer, find the niche, and find the platform.

To have a successful brand, companies need customers to buy their products or services.  One of the biggest aspects of building a successful brand is to figure out who the customer is.  Different demographic and psychological data like gender, age, race/ethnicity, disposable income, beliefs, and hobbies will lead a company to the market that they should be in.  It seems like common sense, yet many companies still cannot grasp the concept.  One industry as a whole that paved its own path and saw meteoric rise was the energy drink business.  Companies like Red Bull, Monster, and Amp rose faster than their sugary drinks make your heart beat.  Given the nature of their product they immediately went out and targeted teenagers, thrill-seekers, and the more extreme side in all of us.  Boy did they get that one right!  Although relatively young in the drink business, energy drinks are running strong despite the constant attacks on the side effects to one’s health.  However, their target market is one that generally neglects health risks in the first place again reiterating that finding out who the customers are is an important part to a successful branding campaign.

The next aspect to branding, and especially a successful branding campaign, is figuring out where the product or service fits into the landscape.  I think this is a little bit different than figuring out who the customer is.  Finding a niche market, in my opinion, pertains more to developing a mission and a business plan that focuses your company within a market and the execution of that plan. To find out where a product or service fits into the business landscape is essentially to figure out where the product or service’s niche in the market is.  There are very few products or services in this world that appeal to everybody everywhere.  That is just natural with the basic wants and needs of consumers being different.  Yet all too often we see brands trying to be everything to everybody.  Take the fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple.  Microsoft has more versatile products and just more products in general.  Apple has fewer products that are known for ultimate functionality though being a bit more complex.  Between Microsoft and Apple, who has the stronger brand?  Even though I am personally a Microsoft guy, I would that Apple has the better brand.  Why?  Because they found their niche in the technology market which is more or less the more tech savvy, and they mastered their niche.  Their customers and even customers with brand loyalties other than Apple hang on every announcement the company makes because they are innovators.  Apple is different.  The rest of the industry follows along on new Apple products to just remotely compete.    

Assuming that companies have the first two aspects to a successful branding campaign down, the third is to find a platform to begin activating upon.  A popular platform for brand activation and marketing is sports.  Sports make the most sense for a lot of companies because there is a sport for just about every demographic segment and sports fans are passionate by nature.  NASCAR is widely regarded as having the most brand loyal fans in all of sports.  I find it much more than mere consequence that the title of most brand loyal fans goes to a sport that has perhaps one of the most niche followings of all the major sports in the United States.  NASCAR is not a sports entity that tries to be everything to everybody like some other sports.  NASCAR fans are passionate about sport and passionate about their brands.  Auto racing does not have the kind of casual following compared to other major sports.  Other major sports also have very avid fans that show brand loyalty to team brands; NASCAR is just the extreme example to prove the point.  It works like this: Fans are passionate about their sport teams… Marketers market their products through sport teams… Fans are passionate about the marketers’ products and buy them.  It really is simple math.  Sports just offer an unparalleled platform of tried and true passion and loyalty, so marketers know what they are getting for their money.  Sports are the closest thing to a sure thing when it comes to marketing platforms. 

McDonalds, in my opinion, is a very interesting brand that activates at a sports level.  McDonalds, ironically enough, is a major sponsor of the Olympic Games.  Yes, a fast food restaurant sponsors the games of the greatest athletes on the planet.  Putting the jokes about athletes never even touching a McDonald’s burger, their place as an Olympic sponsor is a testament to how strong their brand is globally.  As knowledge about food and nutrition grew, the fast food industry came under fire for the negative dietary impacts of their product.  While many took it in stride and continued to target children and people who couldn’t care less what they eat, McDonalds changed.  They didn’t change the product that made the golden arches an iconic symbol, only added options around it.  Given the strength of the McDonalds brand, they saw great success and now boast a restaurant ambiance that closer resembles Starbucks than your typical burger joint.  The strength of a brand relies heavily on how they are able to roll with the punches and play the cards they are dealt.  In the case of McDonalds, their brand’s strength is seen in how they were able to take a negative mark against their entire industry and adapt their business to stay successful.

Some brands may be so strong that they seem like they don’t even need to advertise anymore.  When I think of brands like this, I think of Coca Cola.  Think about it for a second.  If Coke stopped all of their advertising, wouldn’t you still buy their product?  They are so well known and their red can with white writing is so engrained in the minds of people all over the globe that they would probably still see great success.  This is all with a relatively static product.  Coke rarely deviates from the products that they sell.  Sure they have different brands under the Coca Cola company umbrella that need advertising, but the iconic Coke itself does not.  Coke has used sports heavily in their marketing arsenal; in fact, Coke spent $86.55 million on advertising in sports in 2011 according to Sports Business Journal.  That is over 36% of their total advertising budget (Broughton, “Verizon tops”)!  It is to the point that many fans know whether the venue that their favorite team plays at is a Coke venue or a Pepsi venue.  Given the lasting success of the Coca Cola company and how engrained they are in our society today, I think that Coke could potentially have such brand strength that they barely have to market their main product.

Remember how I said that a brand can’t be everything to everyone.  Well even though it may seem crazy, sports are not a platform for every brand.  Take General Motors for example.  GM is typically in the top five in Super Bowl advertisement spending when it comes to the world famous commercials during the game.  Nearly a month ago, GM announced that they will be pulling of their ads from the Super Bowl because they felt that they were not working and the dollars for air time were becoming too high (Friedman, “GM Pulls Out”).  During last season’s Super Bowl, General Motors spent an estimated $21 million on commercials.  Although the Super Bowl brings brands almost unparalleled exposure, sometimes the dollars may not make sense. 

My thought on branding is that way too many companies and businesses leave it up to their customer to decide what their brand will be.  Not enough companies make conscious brand decisions.  There needs to be well-developed plans in place every step of the way.  That makes things more predictable and foreseeable than leaving the branding to the thoughts of the customer.   Plans keep things easy to control and easy to figure out what went wrong and where.  Naturally, not all products or services appeal to everyone.  In my opinion, way too many companies think that their product or service is for everyone and then go about marketing it that way.  In many cases, those companies are setting themselves up for failure and in most cases disappointment.  Businesses neglect the part about finding their niche in the market, and go for the whole market.  Well how are you going to be different from what’s in the market now?  A consumer of Pepsi isn’t just going to drop their Pepsi and try your cola for no reason.  There needs to be a reason why the consumer should try your cola.  Companies forget this, and for most it is their tragic flaw and ultimate downfall. 

Why might something that seems so simple just slip the minds of marketers all over?  Part of may be ego.  Everyone thinks that they have the best idea.  Everyone thinks that their product is the best in the market.  But nobody is above branding.  If a branding campaign comes off as phony, consumers see that and stay away from the product.  If a branding campaign constantly attacks another product within the market, consumers don’t like it (see: Presidential Campaigns).  You may have the best product on the market, but you have to give people a reason to use it.  There is much more to the statement “give the people what they want” than just the product.  Maybe human nature blocks these thoughts for a lot of people.  Maybe it is simple psychology.  Regardless, there usually seems to be a disconnect between the stakeholders’ view of their product and the consumer view of the product.

As I mentioned earlier, I think that sport is the best platform to build a brand.  As a marketer, you know what you are getting with sports fans.  Passionate.  Intense.  Proud.  Yes, more fans than just 76ers fans are all three of those.  When trying to build a brand, those are exactly the people that you want to reach because they will be passionate, intense, and proud about your product too.  However, the relationship between branding and sport is not such a simple love affair.  There are sports that boast more brand loyal fans than others.  There are teams within individual sports that boast more brand loyalty than others.  Companies must have a good gauge on this concept and pick their spots wisely. 

One thing that I strongly believe in when it comes to branding is that companies must brand their product as different to get it recognized.  In most cases, I believe that going above and beyond to create added media attention is great for branding.  Given my personal belief, jersey sponsorships are perfect ways to bring your brand that added attention especially among North American team sports.  Typically the major leagues in the United States do not have jersey sponsorships.  The NBA has talked about it.  Hypothetically, if the NBA decided to turn to jersey sponsors for added revenue and I owned a corporation with a deep pocket, I would throw millions of dollars at the opportunity.  Why?  It would be the first jersey sponsorship ever for one of the top three leagues in America, so the investment would virtually pay for itself before the season even started given the media attention that it is sure to reel in.  It’s about finding the customer, which the team provides with plenty of passionate fans.  It’s about finding the niche, as long as NBA fans are within the niche market the company is trying to reach.  It’s about the platform, and the NBA offers one of the best marketing platforms in North American sports with its almost global reach.  It’s about being different.  Well, there is nothing more different than being the first company ever to have their logo on the front of an NBA jersey. 

The art of branding begins with three basic principles, those being finding the customers, finding the niche, and finding the platform.  Performing those three branding elements to near perfection puts a brand on a path to success right off the bat, and nobody wants to be playing from behind.  It is a strong belief of mine that brands need to do something different to be recognized, and sometimes that means doing something wild and overly out of the ordinary.  Go big or go home.  Sports offer a platform of passion and the ability to be creative and different beyond the imagination of many.  NBA jersey sponsorship would offer an immediate way to brand a company in a way that has never been done before.  Brands need to be bold to survive.  There is nothing bolder than pioneering the age of jersey sponsorship.