[cleeng_content id="954886676" description="99 cents or 10,000 hours. Become an expert for less than a dollar. We do the hard work so you don't have to." price="0.99" referral="0.10"]The World Yacht Racing Forum covers a lot of material that this site discusses regularly. This article is the first of several where we take some of the highlights from panels WYRF 2011 and present them for those who couldn’t make it to Estoril.
This panel was advertised as: The Value of Brand Sponsorships in Yachting: Does the Sport Really Deliver Return on Investment?
It was moderated by David Fuller – Editor of YachtRacing.biz and featured; Nathalie Quere, BT Global Services, Hertha Baumann, Vice President PR and Events Management, Mirabaud & Cie and Kevin Roberts, Editorial Director, SportBusiness Group.
The session started with Hertha Baumann talking about the types of activity that Mirabaud take part in.
I have to start with explaining who Mirabaud is, and perhaps that is one of the reasons for sponsorship. Some people think we are a watch company, some people thing we do cosmetics but actually we are private bankers and we are only about 600 people worldwide with 300 of those in Switzerland.
Our sponsorship started with the Bol d’Or Mirabaud about 6 years ago. We were approached to sponsor the Bol d’Or. This is not new. We have a CEO who is a keen sailor and who loves sailing. So if we ever change CEO to one who likes golf, then I don’t know what will happen, but for the time being, we are involved with sailing.
We also have 3 boats on the lake (Geneva) for staff and we try to do a lot of internal sailing. We’ve also gone into sponsoring the Mirabaud LX, which is a foiler and of course the World Yacht Racing Forum Image competition.
For us, sponsorship is an important activity and sailing is a good sport for us. We have not had any scandals with doping or anything else, and it important being a bank – you have to choose which sports you can get into and match the image of the sport to the image of your brand.
Hertha was then asked what does success look like?
To tell you the truth, it is very difficult to measure. We haven’t done any pre and post research, but our first goal was to have a certain awareness in Switzerland. We are based in Geneva, but even in Lusanne, which is only 70kms from Geneva, nobody knew who Mirabaud was. So we began from a local base and now we are trying to expand and show our presence in Paris and Spain.
To do that we sponsored Dominic Wavre, who started the Barcelona World Race – we are just opening an office in Barcelona. Dominic is Swiss, his companion is French so we had a natural link.
BT has sponsored sailing in many forms for a long time, but now the company is involved with the Olympics. Nathalie Quere from BT Global Services was asked to compare the different events.
For perspective, you need to understand the way we use our sponsorship activities. We have a long history of varied sailing – being involved with Ellen MacArthur and the BT Global Challenge and Alinghi. With the acquisition of Infonet, we had a more international platform and our strategy was to promote our international activity.
When we are doing sponsorship on an international level we are looking at a B2B market. Our customers around the world are the CXOs of major companies – we are targeting the global Fortune 500 and in that sense, sailing sponsorship is a great marketing tool to engage those customers.
This is very different from the Olympics, which is a national sponsorship and BT as BT retail targeting its consumers of the UK market. So we are not looking at the same kind of activation at all. We do activate our Olympic sponsorship internationally as well, but on a much smaller basis.
So the main differences are that we use sailing to target our B2B customers, because that was relevant to the campaigns that we were involved with and we are using the Olympics to engage our wider consumer base.
Much is being made of Sailing on TV, but we wanted to know whether the issue of being on TV was important when sponsors made their decisions. The panel discussed how TV fits into a modern B2B campagin.
Hertha said:
It really does depend on your objectives. If you are looking to build brand awareness worldwide, you will look at a sports sponsorship as a tool to achieve lots of objectives. If you are looking to engage a small number of customers on a 1 to 1 basis, then TV is not so important.
Kevin Roberts added:
There is a view at the moment that TV is a limiting factor on what can be achieved in terms of sports marketing. Too many sports see TV coverage of any sort as being all that matters and things have changed and there are new and smarter ways of doing things. A lot of sports talk about how they can get more television time, when the reality is that the mindset has to change to going beyond TV. The new technologies have a liberating effect, putting the commercial power back into the hands of the rights holders and taking it away from the whims of a program scheduler on some minority sports channel somewhere.
The viewing experience has also changed. Kevin Roberts said:
If a football match is being played on TV, then people do share their emotions through Twitter or similar and there is a greater sharing and a great building of community. It is a wider community though, not bound by just the 4 walls of the house of a nuclear family.
Hertha argues that this is not the same as a live event or sharing emotions as a group. She said:
But sharing alone via Twitter is still not the same as sharing emotions in the pub or in a stadium or on a boat as a guest. One of the most valuable returns you can have is getting people together to share these emotions together.
Kevin Roberts agreed and picked up on one of sailing’s advantages – touch.
The live event is still important from that point of view and sailing can deliver opportunities that very few sports can in that sense. There are maybe two sports where you can share in the event. Golf is one – you can play in a PRo-Am and experience some of the best courses with top players and sailing is the other one – where you can take your corporate guests out and give them a real taste of the experience.
But does sailing deliver a return on investment? The audience asked the brands directly.
Hertha said:
YES. Yes it did. Yes. As an example, with the Barcelona World Race, we started but did not finish. At the start, we had invited staff from our office in Barcelona, we had guests and we shared emotions of the event. We had organised all the PR activty before Dominic had left – we had a press conference in Geneva and in Barcelona. We had a lot of people behind the team – again – sharing emotions and it created empathy.
Nathalie answered:
At BT, we are not looking at ROI as such, we look at return on Objectives, or return on engagement and we define that very clearly. We are looking at engaging our customer and generating business. The results of the boat – whether it will win the race, or perform is not as important – its a nice to have – we won the America’s Cup twice and that was quite a buzz, but we are not basing our return on that performance. Before the race starts we use conferences, hospitality and other activation to share our brand values and at the end of the day, we are measuring if we sign contracts.
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