After a massive UEFA EURO championship, sports fans have now switched their attention to the Rio Olympic Games. But between these two mega events, two other notable sporting contests – the Tour de France and the America’s Cup – took place last week, both of which are establishing a firmer hold on the British sporting psyche.
Their potential impact on the UK sponsorship market is also worth considering. The 103rd Tour de France saw Chris Froome defend last year’s title to claim his third overall. At the America’s Cup World Series in Portsmouth, four time Olympic champion Sir Ben Ainslie, led the Land Rover BAR team to a stunning win over reigning champion Oracle Team USA.
With both the Tour de France and the America’s Cup prologue dominated by British athletes, we looked more closely at the potential impact of both events on domestic fans and sponsorship. Measuring awareness, fan attitudes, and perceived sponsorship fit, using the sponsorship tool ‘SponsorDNA’, we compared how the British public perceives the two events.
We were able to track the perception of each event and match this with the image of a number of high profile brands across 14 key dimensions, to identify perfect fit correlations for current sponsors and potential sponsors.
Not surprisingly, most people identified the prestigious America’s Cup as ‘posh’, and the event ranked second overall amongst the entire study, only behind Wimbledon. Additionally, the America’s Cup is strongly associated with ‘innovation’ and performs 25% better on this measure than the average of all other events. These results indicate that the America’s Cup would be best suited for brands synonymous with ‘innovation’ and ‘quality’, such as consumer electronics or automotive. Conversely, the sailing series appears to be a for a poor FMCG brand fit.
In comparison, the Tour de France’s most strongly identified feature is the perception of its ‘uniqueness’. Only American Football’s NFL is perceived to be more unique than the world’s most famous cycling race among a UK audience. However, even though British riders won four of the last five overall classifications, the Tour de France is still not considered a good fit with ‘British values’. This perception is no doubt largely due to the event name and location.
Interesting findings emerged when we cross-referenced brand perceptions with the events. Brand fit for the America’s Cup is largely guided by the event’s high score on perceptions of being ‘posh’, so naturally a strong fit was recorded for existing sponsors Louis Vuitton and BMW. However, for non-sponsors, the event boasts a near perfect correlation with high-profile brands such as Rolex, Four Seasons Hotels, Mercedes Benz, Lanson Champagne and BNY Mellon.
For the Tour de France, the perfect correlation is less intuitive and the Tour has significant correlations with a number of product categories such as alcohol (Singha Beer and Rekorderlig cider), automotive (Jeep) and Financial Services (Investec). All in all, we observe a rather different event profile for this year’s Tour. Further analysis and comparison to previous years revealed that this year’s Tour rated significantly lower on key dimensions such as “Family Friendly” or “Local”. These findings may be explained by the popularity of the 2014 tour that had three stages held in the UK.
With no Olympic Games or high profile football championships in the ‘odd’ year of 2017, the America’s Cup and the Tour de France could be real contenders for sponsorship next summer. If the British dominance continues, expect an influx of UK brands, or international brands seeking to engage the UK market, into the sponsorship portfolios of the two events.
Liam Hopkins is sponsorship director, and Florian Kogler is sponsorship manager at Leo Burnett London
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