Event Marketing: How to Successfully Promote Events, Festivals, Conventions, and Expositions, Second Edition

Chapter 4

Sponsorship and Cause-Related Event Marketing

“I get to choose whom to sponsor, and I like to give to the areas that I know something about.”

Gordon Getty, billionaire philanthropist (Born 1934)

When you have completed this chapter, you will be able to

• Comprehend the strategic nature of commercial sponsorship within event marketing and its overall income-generation strategy for event properties and their sponsors,
• Carefully and strategically integrate commercial sponsorship within the event marketing mix and understand its important and critical role,
• Establish effective practices for managing sponsorships to promote retention,
• Overcome the objections of commercial sponsors,
• Measure and evaluate commercial sponsorship benefits and features, and
• Link causes to commercial organizations through planned events for mutual benefit.

Understanding the Perspective of the Event Sponsor

In recent years, there has been significant growth in expenditure on sponsorships, a reflection of the ever-present need for differentiation in increasingly competitive markets. Sponsorship involves investment in an event in order to provide the sponsor with the exposure to the benefits of the event. Events all project an image as brands in themselves, and it is this image that sponsors seek to capitalize upon. If an event marketer is to successfully attract sponsors in a competitive market, he or she must be aware of the image factors that his or her event possesses in order to be able to sell ...