In today’s fast-paced digital era, brand image and reputation can change in a heartbeat. Amidst this ever-changing landscape, sponsorships have emerged as a significant tool in the brand management arsenal. However, for a sponsorship to be truly impactful, it’s vital not only to choose the right partner while safeguarding your brand’s reputation through sponsorship governance practices but also to monitor the performance of the sponsorship over time. Let’s delve into the intricacies of why it’s critical to manage and measure your sponsorships correctly to ensure they contribute positively to your brand’s health.

The Foundations of Brand Health

Before we dive into the importance of monitoring sponsorship performance, let’s establish the foundations of brand health:

  1. Customer Perception: Brand health is intrinsically tied to how your customers perceive your brand. Positive associations, trust, and loyalty are the cornerstones of a healthy brand image.
  2. Awareness and Recognition: High brand awareness and recognition are strong indicators of good brand health. When your brand is easily recognizable and memorable, it’s a clear sign of a positive brand image.
  3. Customer Engagement: Healthy brands have engaged and satisfied customers who actively interact with the brand. This interaction happens through various channels, including social media and customer feedback surveys.
  4. Market Competitiveness: A robust brand can maintain or increase its market share and competitiveness. It can adapt swiftly to market changes and shifting consumer preferences.
  5. Metrics & Monitoring: Measuring brand health involves the use of specific metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer feedback, social listening, and surveys. Monitoring brand health is essential for identifying areas for improvement, measuring the impact of marketing efforts, and adapting to change.
  6. Consistency and Differentiation: Healthy brands consistently deliver memorable and differentiated customer experiences. Brands with less satisfactory health struggle to maintain these qualities.

Now, let’s explore how sponsorship performance ties into these foundational elements of brand health.

The Role of Sponsorships in Brand Health

Sponsorships are a powerful tool for shaping brand health. They have the potential to create a cascade of positive effects.

  • Positive Buzz: Well-executed sponsorships can generate tremendous buzz and conversation around your brand. For example, partnering with an influencer, athlete, or celebrity can ignite conversations, getting people to talk about your brand in both online and offline platforms.
  • Positive Impressions: Sponsorships offer a unique opportunity to showcase your brand in environments that resonate with your target audience. This leaves a lasting, positive impression in the minds of consumers.
    • Online, each time your brand logo or message is displayed in conjunction with an event or a personality, it creates impressions. These impressions translate to brand visibility and recognition.
  • Positive Quality: Partnering with entities that share similar values or have a reputation for quality can enhance your brand’s perceived quality. It’s a powerful way to elevate your brand’s image.
    • Online, the quality of your sponsorship promotions plays a significant role. Factors like position, clarity, and viewership affect the perceived quality.
  • Positive Value: This is where KORE’s methodology for quantifying sponsorship value through Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) comes into play. It involves three critical steps:
      1. Identify Brand Promotion: Understand where and how your brand is promoted through the sponsorship.
      2. Calculate Max Ad Value (MAV): This involves multiplying total engagements with Cost Per Engagement (CPE).
      3. Determine Adjusted Ad Value: The MAV is adjusted based on promotion quality factors like position, coverage, logo clarity, competition, crowding, and viewership, as shown in the provided KORE image.

Why Social Listening Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution.

  • Evaluate Social can capture a brand’s social value through:
    • Clear, quality logo visibility
    • Audience data and watch-through rates
    • Built-in computer vision for authentication

These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions. Other social listening tools do not capture the promotion quality that the AAV model provides.

Leveraging KORE’s Technology to Track and Optimize Sponsorship Performance

To maximize the performance of your sponsorships, it’s crucial to have tools that can measure, analyze, and monitor their impact. Here’s where KORE’s state of the art solutions can elevate your partnerships.

  1. Evaluate Omni: With KORE’s Evaluate Omni, brands can drive more valuable partnerships by collecting essential data across social media to assess performance against key metrics, thereby quantifying ROI. This platform allows brands to unify diverse data, apply universal metrics, and adjust their partnership strategy for maximum performance.
  2. Maximizing Performance: KORE offers tools to demonstrate the value of your partnership investments easily. With real-time reporting and analytic tools, showcasing the ROI of sponsorships to partners and executives becomes a breeze.
  3. Smarter Investments: KORE’s tools allow brands to identify high and underperforming partnerships, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and invest smartly.
  4. Value Throughout the Partnership Lifecycle: KORE offers solutions designed to unlock a brand’s potential, right from the research phase to activation, helping brands invest in the right partners.

Sponsorships are no longer just about your brand’s logo being placed everywhere. It’s about strategic placements, quantifying the performance, and optimizing for better results. By effectively tracking and analyzing sponsorship performance, brands can ensure they remain at the forefront of their industry, capturing audience attention, and driving brand health to new heights.

Are you looking to elevate your brand’s partnership strategy and performance? Don’t fall behind industry trends. Schedule a demo with KORE today. As the global leader in engagement marketing and data intelligence in sports and entertainment, we are committed to matching you with the right solution tailored to your brand’s needs.

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Mandy Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.