It was a couple of years ago that I interviewed Julie Clark, partner at PWC about the Global Media & Entertainment Outlook for 2008-12 published by the firm for a column I write on Brand Republic, the marketing portal. We were discussing the future growth of the sponsorship sector and in particular the dominance of sports sponsorship.

Her view, which was very prescient, was that in the future companies will involve themselves more with sports sponsorship not because of awareness or brand marketing objectives per se but because of corporate social responsibility objectives which will become important within their commercial thinking.

In the current General Election in the UK we've all heard comments from all political parties about their vision for society or "Big Society" so it comes as no surprise that within advertising and marketing circles CSR has gained in currency and moved to centre stage.

However, what's been missing to date has been any form of robust research that has explored the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and grass roots activities and the bottom line.

A few years' ago, if you ever spoke to a major sponsor about CSR and ROI, the standard answer tended to be "we don't measure it in that way" or "we don't do it for commercial reasons", etc.

Those responses now beg the question - why not? Afterall, if advertisers are thinking of getting involved in sports sponsorship for CSR reasons, they need to have a strong commercial reason for doing so. Marketing budgets are tight and so boards of companies need to assured that any type of major sponsorship will generate a Return on Investment (ROI) that contributes to the bottom line - otherwise it could end up being wasteful.

So the research and training project we are launching with Cambridge Judge Business School couldn't be happening at a better time and it's already attracting significant support from within the industry.

For example, Karen Earl, one of the world's most influential people in sponsorship and chairman of the European Sponsorship Association emailed me:

"What an interesting project. It comes at a very timely moment as I am in the middle of trying to write something for an IPA publication and one of the aspects is how many and what sort of people engage with sponsorship as an advertising medium. Interestingly, there is a lot of mostly meaningless research out there about sponsorship..."

The independent research and training project will use a mix of research and analysis techniques including questionnaires, in-depth interviews with sponsors and mathematical modelling in order to understand the relationship between CSR and grass roots activities and ROI.

Following the conclusion of the research phase, we aim to publish a special toolkit and training workshop for companies so that they can start to measure and evaluate the benefits of CSR and grass roots activities as they would an on-line marketing campaign, giving them a higher degree of confidence to invest in these areas.

 

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites