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Sponsorship Wimbledon Branding

A serving of simplicity: How Wimbledon wins at branding

By John Viccars, head of strategy

July 10, 2015 | 5 min read

Every summer, a private club with fewer than 500 members holds a tennis tournament in London that produces a clear profit in excess of £35 million in just two weeks.

In addition to several longstanding commercial relationships with Robinsons (80 years) and Rolex (33 years), Wimbledon holds the longest ever sports sponsorship, with official ball supplier Slazenger being commercially tied to the tournament since 1902. So what’s the secret?

An anomaly in our modern day sporting world, akin perhaps with the Olympics and The Masters for brand management, iconic Wimbledon is characterised by a lack of commercial presence, minimal on-site branding for sponsors and a strict dress code. The tournament organiser, The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), has the belief in the clarity and strength of the brand proposition and the confidence to allow the brand to stand alone, but there is more to this success story.

Drawn to the high percentage ABC1 audience that Wimbledon attracts, sponsors long to be associated with the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament. Relevant product placement is vitally important but brands must have an affinity to tennis to maximise ROI.

IBM manages the tournament scoring, so is present on the scoreboards. Robinsons supplies the drinks, so Robinsons bottles appear on the umpire chairs ready for the players to grab. Rolex is the official timekeeper, so their clocks are used on court. Slazenger provides the tennis balls.

All serve a purpose for the tournament and appear exactly where consumers expect to see them. The link to Wimbledon is logical allowing brands to build an emotive relationship with tennis fans from its target audience.

Category exclusivity is key. Common sense tells us the more brands there are from a certain category sponsoring an event, the less meaningful that sponsorship becomes, and the more diluted the impact. Wimbledon ensures that category competition is minimal and that brands are aligned with the values of the tournament and the brand.

And there is digital and social innovation too. The competition for tickets is fierce, so what better way to satisfy a global audience than to ensure the optimum digital spectator experience. The digital platforms truly replicate and reflect the brands and are always driven by enhancing the spectator experience.

From Jaguar’s activation of biometric wearable tech that monitors the heart rate and movements of the crowd, to IBM’s team of 200 staff that ensure the 145,000 real time updates are delivered accurately and timely... everything is driven by experience.

The most successful sponsors use promotional activity to maximise sponsorship impact, delivering greater depth and credibility to the association between brand and event by building stories that help marry the two together in the minds of consumers.

Evian and Stella Artois, as relatively new sponsors of Wimbledon since 2008 and 2014 respectively, illustrate the power of brand experience in enhancing their sponsorship. 2014 saw both brands deliver integrated and relevant experience-led campaigns resulting in high levels of ‘prompted awareness’ in comparison to long standing sponsors.

With Evian standing at 57 per cent ‘prompted awareness’, more are aware of its sponsorship than that of Rolex (54 per cent) which has been an official supplier since 1978, or IBM (36 per cent), an official supplier since 1990. Whilst Stella Artois’s two year sponsorship is recognised by 32 per cent, more than Hertz (19 per cent) and Lanson (14 per cent), both of which have been official suppliers for over ten years.

The comparatively rapidly built and high levels of sponsorship awareness for these brands can be explained by the diverse and engaging promotional activity that they have invested in, all with enhanced experience at its heart.

Both Stella Artois and Evian have successfully amplified the Wimbledon experience and utilised the a variety of channels to ensure maximum impact, with Evian’s 2014 #LetsPlay campaign content receiving over 1.9m views.

Both have tapped into the insight that the audience at home want to be as close to the experience as possible, and as a result have created content and campaigns that not only share the moments that you normally only see if you are inside SW19, but allow you to be part of the content, no matter where you are.

That’s what’s smart about the Wimbledon brand. With the strength and conviction of its proposition it forces brands to think like it does and as a result deliver campaigns that always enhance the spectator experience; this discerning audience will not engage with anything that doesn’t. The lack of signage and overt branding forces sponsors to think clean when coming up with ‘their Wimbledon’ moments, pushing them towards emerging technologies, as in the case of Jaguar and its biometric analysis, or to tell well-loved, truth based stories, like Stella Artois' Perfectionists series, in order to truly own their moment.

Simplicity is the key to Wimbledon’s success. Sponsors are not able to buy their position here, but have to earn it by being genuinely relevant and useful. Anything less will not cut it. A lot of pressure perhaps, but get it right and there are significant rewards to be gained from association with this global sporting event and its high percentage of ABC1 audience.

John Viccars is head of strategy at RPM

Sponsorship Wimbledon Branding

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