The Art of Sponsorship

A longer form piece where I detail some of our thinking behind sports sponsorships, particularly elite road racing in the UK.....read on.

Brother UK’s sponsorship of UK cycling might serve as a case study for how to engage with a low cost, occasionally beleaguered sport, rich with talent and tradition, and, by its very nature as a travelling circus whose biggest events receive national television coverage, rich with potential to increase brand awareness.

Managing Director Phil Jones MBE is now deeply immersed in the sport, as supporter and participant. It is his dispassionate analysis of cycling as a vehicle to achieve Brother UK’s marketing goals, however, that offers the greatest insight.

Brother UK has more than lived up to its motto “At Your Side” in its dealings with domestic cycling. For seven years, it has funded a fleet of neutral service vehicles, served as event sponsor to several of the biggest events on the UK calendar, and now enters its third year as cash sponsor to a host of men’s and women’s teams. Its support for cycling is a reflection of the company’s wider culture.

 “Our goal is to make people and businesses more successful more quickly. By being in the sport, we’re helping athletes to become more successful more quickly by providing a better environment, greater financial support, a neutral support service that’s fit for purpose,” Jones explains. “But also by the nature of our brand, by being a big name that has sponsored big sports, we hope to shine a light upon elite cycle racing in the UK.”

It is misleading however to regard Brother in cycling as a philanthropic exercise. There is a hard commercial edge underlying each of its investments, which, for those who care genuinely for the sport’s longevity, is reassuring, rather than alarming. Far better that cycling should justify Brother’s support with return on investment, rather than as an indulgence of the boss.

 “I couldn’t support cycling if it didn’t deliver for us against our brand awareness goals and business objectives, otherwise you’re making decisions more with your heart, than with your head,” Jones explains.

 “We are sponsors, not philanthropists. I’m using Brother’s money, and not my own. I’m entrusted to spend that money wisely to do things that contribute to our business objectives. The moment that any investment fails to deliver that, it falls under the spotlight for review.”

 Brother UK has combined a managing director’s passion with clear commercial goals to develop a long-term sponsorship that works by any measure. How then is it done?

 Football and F1

 Cycling offers Brother UK significantly reduced entry costs, compared to its previous sporting investments. The company served as shirt sponsor to Manchester City FC for more than a decade and has sponsored three Formula One teams.

 Sponsorships do not come larger than Premier League football and Formula One, but if brand awareness or increased sales are the headline factors, there is often a host of additional concerns, including presence within a geographical territory and the sport’s resonance with its target audience.

 “Sponsorship is driven by a few things. Where you are in terms of your maturity as a business and the next phase of your commercial objectives plays a big part,” Jones explains.

 “Our decisions around Manchester City, Formula One and UK cycling have been linked to specific pieces of business activity. What benefit are we trying to achieve? Is it brand awareness, or revenue generation? Our start point is to establish where are we trying to go, and then to evaluate the sports or other activities that might help us get there.”

 The relationship with Manchester City lasted for 11 years, from 1988 to 1999 - a significant period for any sponsorship (“By the time it finished, it was probably one of longest sponsorships in the Football League.”)

 It achieved the twin objectives of raising the profile of Brother UK nationally, while celebrating its regional identity as a division of a global business located in Manchester. When Brother’s European business grew more significant, the sponsorship came to a natural end.

 Formula One has few competitors in helping a company to establish a global presence. Brother’s six-year investment in F1 included a season with Tyrell (1998), a season with Williams (1999), and four years with Jordan (2000 to 2003).

 “Our sponsorships in that period were about trying to establish Brother on a global stage, and F1 was the sport,” Jones says. “There was a lot of alignment with technical excellence, audience demographic and speed. We were doing much more business with private and public sector enterprises and FI was a good sport to match messages to those markets.”

 Cycling and Brother UK’s demographic

 Cycling offers three distinct appeals to Brother UK. The first is the obvious increase in brand awareness that accrues from a sport whose biggest events gain national television coverage.

 The second is its alignment with a demographic of specifiers in large public and private enterprises. Jones’s experiences on the road, followed by formal research, gave credence to an instinct that the professionals Brother UK was trying to engage were now more likely than not to be cyclists or interested in the professional sport.

 Finally, UK cycling especially offers fantastic value for money to companies like Brother, who had previously invested the vast sums commanded by Formula One and the Premier League.

 “The reality is that the market access price to UK cycling is very inexpensive, relative to other sports. When you’re looking at Conti-level teams and domestic sport in the UK - it might mean a different market access cost in Belgium, where cycling is the national sport – but here, it represents very good value for money,” Jones says.

 “At the same time, I knew there was a strong correlation between our target demographic and participants in the sport, people who cite cycling as a primary means of sport or hobby. In the early days, it was a bit of a risk, based on the hunch that the people I met on the road were the same people we were trying to reach as a business using other methods of brand awareness.”

 Hunches are a good starting point, but Brother UK now has hard financial data to support Jones’ instinct – based on a more sophisticated version of the trusted Advertising Value Equivalent metric - and a detailed report that offers clear evidence for the success of its cycling strategy taking into account social media reach.

 “The money we generate from our sponsorships, compared to the investment required to secure them, represents outstanding value for money, in my view.”

 Support for UK cycle sport

 Such positive messages are at odds with the prevailing narrative among some sections of the cycling media that UK race scene is in a state of terminal decline. Not only do such dire warnings of the domestic sport’s demise contradict the experience of blue chip investors like Brother UK, they must ultimately dampen the enthusiasm of potential sponsors.

 Fortunately for the teams and events who rely on his company’s support, Jones recognises the commercial model behind doom-laden headlines. For Brother UK, and presumably for other heavyweights like Prudential, OVO Energy, Skoda et al, who support domestic cycling year after year, the sport generates valuable return on investment.

 “The reality is that we’re back to that point of, ‘don’t believe everything you read’. The job of a lot of media outlets is to generate traffic to a website, and the best way to do that is to write click-baited headlines, because there’s an advertising model that supports that,” he says.

 “If you understand a sport, and I’ve been lucky enough to do so - the personalities, the teams, what’s really going on - yes, there is a serious climate where there aren’t many major sponsors around, but teams and rights owners have been working hard to retain existing partners. Those who are there, and who are re-investing year after year, realise that teams and the sport can do a good job for you, if you make smart choices.”

 Jones has been wise enough to listen to those who have spent a lifetime in the sport and who recognise its cyclical nature, no pun intended. The pattern is one he is familiar with from a commercial context.

 “When you’ve been in business a while, you’ll know a lot of things are cyclical. People who were cycling professionally in the late 80s and 90s, tell me the same thing happened then; that teams folded but the sport moved on and evolved. Here we are with the sport evolving again, with some races dissipating, but with new races emerging; with some teams collapsing, but new and different teams emerging on the other side of it.”

 ROI vs. philanthropy

 For those whose only connection with cycling is as hobby or means of escape, it can be hard to understand the commercial realities of sponsorship. For those tasked with spending money - and other people’s especially - the sport can take on a different hue.

 That said, major sponsorship of sporting events is often generated by the passion of senior leaders within the organisation paying for the privilege of association. Jones makes no secret of his love for cycling and the benefits it has accrued to him, in terms of health, wellbeing and friendships. It’s that which led him to see the opportunity of sponsorship within the sport.

 “I think there is a strong correlation between a sport that a business becomes involved with and the passion of the people in the ‘C-Suite’. Sponsorship is usually linked to big ticket investment, which senior executives must sign off. Passion gives them an extra sense that the investment is right; not only is it supported by financial evidence, but by their personal experience, too.”

 How then does he draw the line and ensure that Brother UK’s interest in cycling remains commercial and not philanthropic? Tilting the balance towards charity would be disastrous for both parties. Jones is clear: the moment cycling fails to deliver on Brother UK’s business goals is the moment the company reviews its investment strategy.

 If this seems unromantic, wiser heads might recognise the value of commercial discipline. Cycling is beautiful, compelling and embodies a host of positive social outcomes, from increased physical and mental health to reduced carbon emissions. Why should it rely on charity? Jones makes plain that the sport continues to satisfy Brother UK’s commercial needs.

 “We have a number of reviews done which provide us with financial data around the amount of people that we’re reaching, and the demographics – what in old money was called the Advertising Value Equivalent,” Jones explains. 

 “We can pull back and apply arbitrary figures to create a broad ROI. We know that we’ve spent X amount of money, and we know we’ve generated media equivalent of y or z. That report on its own more than justifies everything we’ve spent.”

 Sponsor needs

 Brother UK’s interests in cycling are diverse and comprehensive, ranging from sponsorship of teams and events to funding a fleet of neutral service support vehicles.

 In spite of the breadth of its support, Brother UK has avoided the pitfall of ‘wallpapering’ the sport, largely by the duration of its commitment, and by the strategic nature of its investments. A detailed knowledge of UK cycle sport is obvious from the diversity of its portfolio.

 The man behind it is ideally placed to answer the simple question: what does a sponsor need from cycling?

 “We’re quite new to team sponsorship,” Jones admits. “This will be our third year, but already I’ve seen varying standards, when it comes to meeting a sponsor’s. needs. I’ve seen the worst case scenario - cheque cashed, not heard from someone very much - to teams like Vitus Pro Cycling, p/b Brother UK and Crimson Performance, who are very sensitive to the need for frequent communication with their sponsors and activity alignment.”

 Communication is the key word for Jones, and presumably for those in other large-scale organisations charged with making “big ticket” investments in sport or other marketing vehicles. If the sport is ‘broken’, as the headline writers attest, it is in this aspect more than any other.

 For a team owner at UCI Continental level and below, communication with the sponsor is desirable, but often hard to achieve, given the myriad duties of running a cycling team on a small budget. For the sponsor, however, communication with the team is the overriding priority.

 “Teams have to communicate with sponsors and it doesn’t take much to do so, but there is often a broken loop. Team owners want to communicate, which they could, but they have so much to juggle - booking travel, dealing with a sick rider, changing schedules, running their own life. They’re doing this on a shoestring and the sponsor is saying: ‘How are you going to activate this sponsorship?’ It’s tough.”

 Sponsor needs - two

 To return to an earlier them: if a business funding a cycling team must be treated as a sponsor and not as a benefactor, is there still not room for a little benevolence? “There has to be,” Jones agrees.

 It is crucial to note, however, that his admittance of a half-way point on the sponsorship-philanthropy axis (“we’re probably at 75 per cent”) is only to better achieve the sponsor’s goals. Jones demands high standards of the teams in whom he invests Brother’s cash, but he is not blind to their needs.

 Having sponsored Formula One teams, “where there are people whose job is to do nothing other than activate sponsorship”, he is aware that teams in domestic cycling exist in a different financial universe. If both parties are sufficiently engaged, however, the gap can be bridged.

 “Even though cycling has been going a long time, the commercial side of the sport is still quite immature, especially to a company like Brother, who stands from the outside looking in. I realised that from that get-go. We can use our resources at Brother UK to assist, to some degree. We looked at joint activities and took on some of the work load, understanding that we were getting a particularly good deal on sponsorship.”

 Examples? Jones has equipped Simon Howes’ Brother UK-Tifosi p/b OnForm squad with kit bags and puffa jackets. Terry Williamson’s Brother UK-FusionRT team has received aero socks and 200 water bottles. Jones’ product team has worked closely with Cherie Pridham, the owner and manager of Vitus Pro Cycling Team, p/b Brother UK, to implement printing and labelling technology and ease her administrative burden.

 Cycling’s comparatively low cost of entry means that for a smart investor, some of the money saved by sponsoring a cycling team rather than a Premier League football club can be reinvested in support, but Brother UK’s benevolence is based on more than finances. Jones’ respect for those who run the teams he sponsors is genuine.

 “Many of them are well-intentioned people, who work their socks off to run these teams and develop riders for little or no personal reward. It’s a no-brainer for us to support them, for the amount of financial investment that they’re asking in return for team naming rights. We benefit them as much as they benefit us, and we can help them over the lifetime of the sponsorship to improve their activation.”

 Activation

 Examples of Brother UK activating its own sponsorship are several and often uncostly. To take one at random: the riders of Vitus Pro Cycling Team, powered by Brother UK, will each receive an embroidered podium cap. Total cost per cap to Brother UK? ￡14 (￡10 for the cap; ￡4 for embroidery).

 Jones has already considered the potential, imagining Ed Clancy, the team’s leader, wearing the cap to celebrate victory and to collect the Brother Fastest Lap trophy at a round of the Brother UK-supported Tour Series. The twice-weekly race series is televised, with each episode reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands of people.

 Additionally, Brother UK’s VIP guests at the race will receive their opportunity to meet Clancy in a co-branded gazebo, bearing the logos both of Vitus Pro Cycling Team and Brother UK. The gazebo has been designed, ordered and paid for by Brother UK. The cost is minimal, when compared to its impact in the pit lane, especially if the television crews use it as a location to interview the triple Olympic champion and his team-mates.

 “The gazebo will look great. It gives us a physical presence in the pits, which is going to look visually arresting. The podium caps are another simple concept: Formula One teams use them, UCI World Tour teams use them. They’re low cost and effective,” Jones says, clearly enthused.

 “It’s taking a business perspective. Sometimes you almost have to look outside of your industry whenever you can to come up with new models. Quite often the problem has been solved elsewhere. You just have to be prepared to take a broader view.”

 The podium caps and the gazebo provide evidence of a can-do attitude at Brother UK that illustrates Jones’ willingness to fill the gap faced by a time-pressed team manager. Getting things done is very much part of the Brother credo.

 “The difference between Brother UK and a lot of other companies is that they find these simple but effective methods of activation difficult to achieve. People talk about creating a gazebo, but at our place, it’s done, and within weeks - wording decided, ordered. Podium caps? Done. We’re very good at delivering on our promises.”

 Conclusion

 The positive outcomes Brother UK continues to enjoy from its sponsorship of cycle sport offers a refreshing narrative at a time when many headlines paint a harrowing picture of the commercial realities around sponsorship. A company that has previously sponsored Formula One teams and a Premier League football club will have approached cycling with high standards. Their fulfilment is cause for encouragement.

 Jones raises a number of important points, both for teams and events seeking sponsorship, and corporates of similar scale who might wish to enjoy the same benefits. The need for the sponsor to establish clear goals for its investment, the need for the team to communicate, the acknowledgement of both parties that activation is likely to be a joint task - all are valuable insights.

 After seven years in the sport, Jones is fully aware of the significance of Brother UK’s involvement. Funding a fleet of neutral service vehicles, cash support of four teams, event sponsorship…the company’s support is comprehensive and, as long as cycling continues to meet the company’s business objectives - ongoing.

 “Over the years, we’ve become more established in the sport. I didn’t quite realise in the early days the importance of the things we were doing. If we didn’t fund neutral service support, for example, the fabric of how it is provided would fundamentally change. [Manager] Tony Barry would need to find a company prepared to fund it in the way we fund it.”

 In contrast to the doom-laden headlines routinely written when a team folds, for whatever reason, Jones does not believe that the sport’s funding model is fundamentally flawed. Within Brother UK’s circle, he points to teams like Vitus Pro Cycling Team, p/b Brother UK and Crimson Performance, who work with marketing agencies to ensure that all-important activation process takes place.

 More broadly, he is in favour of looking beyond the sport for fresh ideas on how the sponsorship model might be augmented. Ask him if the sponsorship model is “broken”, to use a popular phrase, and his answer is succinct: “It’s not insurmountable.”

 “Every sport can find its way, one way or the other,” he continues. “You just need to right people around the table to come up with smart and creative solutions to figure out the problem.”

  Watch this space.