Over half of young consumers disagree with ambush marketing at sporting events
Young consumers aged 16-24 favour official sponsors over ambush marketing at sporting events, new research has found.
The study, carried out by Voxburner, surveyed over 1,000 young consumers online about their views around sports sponsorship, with 59 per cent admitting they don’t agree with ambush marketing.
In addition, 66 per cent of those surveyed said that brands actively associating themselves with sporting events should be official sponsors and feature the official logo.
The research also showed that young consumers were not impressed by ‘unofficial’ brands leveraging sports events – 78 percent agreed with organisers policing their events to prevent unofficial sponsors receiving publicity.
Commenting on the results, Luke Mitchell, head of insight at Voxburner, commented: “Often in our research about marketing effectiveness, young people appear keen to deny brands’ success at selling to them. Yet in these results we see acknowledgement that sponsorship achieves visibility and the use of event-related messaging on products makes them more attractive."
He added: “Brands that spend millions to be part of these events will be pleased to see that sponsorship appears pretty effective as a brand awareness tool. When it comes to dislike of ambush marketing, follow up discussions with young people indicate that it’s about brands being classy - marketers may not realise that young people have a good understanding of their tactics.”
The research also looked at which brands are the most memorable around sporting events and found that the top three that are remembered as being associated with the London 2012 Olympic games were McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Adidas - all official sponsors of the event.
Of unofficial rival brands featuring high in the results, Nike ranked highest in 4th place.