The Benefits of a Sports Sponsorship for Your Food Brand
Like any non-football fan, I tune into the Super Bowl for two things; ads and the halftime show. Instead of diving deep into who lip-syncs and who doesn’t, let’s explore the ad side of things; sports sponsorships. Obviously, the brands that advertise during the Super Bowl have major budgets and can afford to spend money on the most coveted media placement in the U.S., but that shouldn’t stop smaller brands from exploring opportunities in sports sponsorships for food brands.
What will your food brand get with a sports sponsorship?
Brand Awareness
No doubt, you will increase brand awareness. And we know that awareness is the first step in the path to purchase. Having your food brand’s advertisements in a stadium or other sports arena is an opportunity for a huge amount of exposure. Not only that, but the positive associations fans have with their team will transfer over to your brand. To predict the number of views in the stadium, take the average number of tickets sold multiplied by the number of games. Your partner organization should have the expected number already calculated in your contract!
Target Marketing
Target marketing is a great way to advertise to a specific audience. You are going to have a general consensus on what these sports fans like leading you to more effective marketing. Knowing your audience influences any slogan you’ll use and the tone your campaign will want to take. Do some research to determine what sport fits best with your target market. Does your brand resonate more with football fans or basketball fans? Do they prefer a quieter game like tennis or golf, or want the excitement of cheering on their favorite baseball team? Identifying a new segment should come relatively quickly if you know your brand voice. Ensure that the sports organization’s tone aligns with your food brand too!
Wide Range of Platforms
Sports marketing can reach millions. In addition to traditional advertising, like radio and print; social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can generate even more buzz in a non-traditional way. Not to mention the views from television airings of games that will feature your food brand sports sponsorship materials! Your food brand should be sharing photos and videos featuring your sports sponsorship on your social media pages, but your partner organization should be thanking and acknowledging your food brand on theirs as well. Add social media exposure, radio, print, and television views and your food brand sports sponsorship’s impressions should be significant.
What to consider while creating a sports sponsorship campaign
Placement
Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, Australia
Where will your ad be placed in and around the stadium? Is it in a central location, like on the football field at the Super Bowl or on the basketball hoop during March Madness? Your food brand needs to ensure that your ad will be visible, especially during television broadcasts, which will get you those high exposure numbers that are the driving force of sports sponsorships.
If you have any questions about growing your food brand with sports sponsorships, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food brand marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.