How CMOs Choose Athletes And Sporting Events To Sponsor

Sponsorships are an important way that marketers choose to strengthen brands, drive awareness, and build businesses. The challenge, however, is deciding on a particular sport, event, celebrity, or athlete to sponsor. To think about the approach that marketers take, I connected with 1Password?CMO, Melton Littlepage, on the company’s choice to sponsor the Presidents Cup and PGA TOUR professional, Mackenzie Hughes.?

Brand Background

Understanding who to sponsor starts with understanding the brand. Littlepage explains that, although 1Password started as a password manager, “it has expanded into a multi-product security company protecting over 150,000 businesses and millions of consumers around the world. With hybrid work now widely accepted, the way we work has fundamentally changed—and how we protect that work must also change. To boost their productivity while embracing the flexibility of modern work, employees are using their personal devices for work and turning to applications not visible to their IT and security teams—otherwise known as shadow IT. Despite companies seeing explosive growth in these new situations, traditional security tools haven’t kept pace with the modern workplace, leaving many businesses vulnerable to data breaches and unauthorized access.? In response to this, we recently launched 1Password Extended Access Management (XAM), a new security solution that helps businesses secure every sign-in to every app from every device—even the unmanaged ones that often fall outside the control of IT and security teams.”

Why Sponsorships?

Littlepage explains that the reasoning for investing in sponsorships has to do with driving awareness. “When evaluating our marketing strategy, we wanted to strengthen our top-of-the-funnel brand awareness among both B2B and B2C audiences. Our bottom-of-the-funnel trial and conversion rates were very positive—we just needed to get the customer to those phases. So, we did our homework and the research showed us where our target customers were most open to being educated and influenced when they weren’t at work. The sweet spot? Sporting events.

?We considered several variables before moving forward with this sponsorship. Not only did we want to work with an organization that was deeply aligned with our brand, but a partner that would allow us to share our story with a broader audience.”

Choosing the Presidents Cup

Once deciding that sponsoring something related to sports made sense, the next step was to figure out which sporting event. Littlepage says that “Before formalizing our sponsorship, our research indicated that golf was one of the top sports—and superior to other out-of-home (OOH) advertising and entertainment opportunities—that would help us reach our target buyer in a way that would create an emotional connection while also giving us a platform to tell our story.

Sports fans are extremely passionate. The process of rooting for a team or specific player creates a deeply emotional bond—one that’s well past logical. From a brand perspective, that’s important because we know people buy with their hearts and justify with their heads. When we embed our brand into a sport people love, and into teams and athletes they root for, that emotional allegiance trickles into our brand—this is a great thing! Television commercials or social advertising just don’t garner that same emotional bond.

Additionally, the Presidents Cup is a unique global team competition between elite golfers versus an individual competition. It offers no purse or prize and participants play for charity, and as a Canadian-founded company, this year’s tournament is taking place on our home turf, Canada.?

We’ve also partnered with Mackenzie Hughes—a professional golfer and PGA TOUR member, and a long-time 1Password customer. Mackenzie has played on the PGA TOUR since 2016.”?

?Maximizing ROI

A challenge related to sponsorships can be designing and measuring a program to maximize and prove ROI. Littlepage indicates “We’ve created a 360-degree integrated campaign around the Presidents Cup that started months before the Presidents Cup tees off on September 24 and will extend for six months after. It was important to make a splash leading up to and at the tournament with branding, TV commercials, hospitality, as well as social media campaigns. The Presidents Cup gives us both a scalable way to reach millions of passionate golf fans viewing the event and exceptional VIP hospitality experiences to entertain customers and partners on-site at the Royal Montreal Golf Club.

An onsite activation we’re sponsoring at the Presidents Cup is Club 1Password, a premium hospitality venue—located between the 15th and 17th tees at the Royal Montreal Golf Club—that will host 5,000 patrons each day. With places for attendees to grab a meal, socialize with golf fans, and even partake in a putting challenge, an activation like this allows us to create a unique and long-lasting experience for tournament attendees and our customers, and also have them engage directly with our brand.

Following the event, we’ll be expanding our marketing activations well into 2025 and will continue to leverage our long-term partnership with Mackenzie Hughes, who is one of the twelve Presidents Cup International Team members. Our goal is to continue building 1Password’s brand awareness and to drive businesses, families, and individuals to our solutions.”?

?Advice When Engaging in Sponsorships

Littlepage suggests that there are steps CMOs can take to strengthen sponsorship performance. For example, he says that “storytelling matters the most. Craft your story in a way that strikes a chord in the hearts of your target buyers, who are also fans of the sport you’re sponsoring. Then, find a partnership that gives you a platform to tell your story as well as it can possibly be told—also consider if that partnership enables you to connect directly with your buyer audience, without any extra layers or channels between. Do your homework and follow the data—this is key to confidently and successfully striking large partnerships, knowing that you’ll be putting your story in front of your target buyers in situations where they’ll be open to hearing your message in order to create brand affinity.”

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler

Originally published in Forbes here