Experiential sports and leisure equals pleasure!
When you think of sporting and leisure events you imagine crowds of people from different backgrounds, all with various likes and dislikes. For a brand trying to target a certain demographic with particular products it could seem like an arduous task but by taking a closer look at the experiential opportunities involved in the events you can see why these spaces are sought after.
Sports and leisure are “not as mass as they might seem,” says Paul Porter, planning partner at Pulse. “These events have a specific audience which means engagement levels are so much greater than activity at other traditional experiential venues.”
Anna Bradshaw, account director at BEcause, comments: “With some experiential campaigns you have to generate your own crowd and then engage the audiences, but sports and leisure events come with their own crowds, so you can focus all your efforts on the engagement side of things.”
It is not just the demographic that can have an affect on experiential activity: mood and atmosphere of the people and place can also play a part.
As Kelly Williams, sales director at specialist sports marketing agency Sports Revolution observes: “Sports offers an expansive environment. Events take place largely at weekends when people are enjoying down time. This makes it a relaxed, happy environment as opposed to train stations where people are on their commute to work. You are not stopping their daily activity, and there are no time constraints.”
In other words, consumers have made a conscious effort and choice to be at a sports or leisure event. As Paul Saville, client services director at experiential marketing agency Ignite, explains: “By allowing customers to select their brand experience based on their own interests and preferences, the experience is not only interactive, but customer-focused. If the process is personally interactive and engaging, it will lead to increased customer satisfaction and ultimately an increase in brand loyalty.”
It also means that you get a “highly receptive audience who have a much greater dwell time and receptiveness to messages; they are eager to engage and keen to understand your brand messaging,” says Paul Porter at Pulse.
Understanding the audience for sports or social events is key if you want to heighten their experience while still getting your brand messaging across.
Anna Bradshaw notes that: “Some of the best brand experiences are those that add value to the host event. It’s important to think about need states of consumers at the event. Are they tired? Will they need somewhere to sit? Do they need some refreshment? Do they need entertaining? Do they need their phone charging?”
An example of this kind of added value would be the work that Sports Revolution did with Barclays for its second year as Official Premiership Sponsor.
An integrated campaign saw 16 partner programmes distributing branded fixture cards by club and included a six week in-stadia poster campaign to raise awareness for a ‘Win A Contract’ competition. A total of 320,000 cards were distributed across 16 clubs, exceeding the original target and reaching over 50% of Barclays primary target audience, ‘real’ football fans, with something relevant and engaging.
However, big sports and leisure venues are not always right for experiential campaigns: it depends on the brand, as Sarah Trumble, client services director at Tribe, explains. For brands in their “infancy” then Trumble argues that “the messaging can get a little lost at larger events.”
She cites a recent campaign for a specialist pet food brand where “the need to impart the complexities of the diet were hard to achieve with so many other activities going on around the particular county show we were attending. Part of the campaign strategy included us attending smaller, low key venues, including local parks, which worked far more effectively in terms of brand messaging recognition and uptake of product.”
Overall, as Paul Saville at Ignite concludes, the activity “should be something that catalyses memories, creates conversations and content and unites communities. There is no stronger way to believe something than to experience it.”
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