Grassroots Activation - The Missing Piece Of The Sponsorship Puzzle?

There’s lot of analysis already on what the Rugby World Cup (RWC) sponsors are doing to activate their sponsorships. With the sports marketing world waiting for each new element to go live – there’s a lot of pressure to get it right says Sophie Morris, Strategic Marketing & Sponsorship Consultant, Chartered Marketer at Millharbour Marketing

For RWC sponsors, their activation is global and focused around the tournament, but national team sponsors are activating too.

England Rugby’s sponsors activate all year round and have an additional objective at RWC Tournament time; that is to engage with the rugby community and ensure it benefits from the Tournament being held in England.

Supporting the grassroots game can seem unappealing compared to the glitz of having your logo all over the players, entertaining clients in hospitality or utilising the team’s assets through your own marketing, but the grassroots is where you can actually make a difference to someone’s (i.e. your customer’s) life.

What would be more meaningful to an individual: seeing your logo on the shirt of the team they support, or you enabling them or their children to improve their life? 

It can complete the sponsorship activation puzzle. You already have high-level brand awareness, PR, experiential, customer reward and fan engagement, etc. But now you also have a way of truly engaging.  The phrase is sometimes used a bit too loosely, but improving someone’s life through your marketing is surely one of the strongest ways you could engage with someone. It can give lifetime brand loyalty and advocacy with the passion and emotion that people tend to have with something that has been life changing for them.

To give some context to what the RFU’s RWC legacy programme is trying to achieve, there are seven strands based around delivering either building capacity or increasing participation. Looking at two of England’s biggest sponsors, O2 and QBE, we can see how they are contributing to those goals. 

We are expecting participation in rugby to increase regardless of how the England team performs and if we have increased numbers of players turning up to clubs we need more coaches to train them. QBE have taken this as their legacy strand and created the ‘QBE Coaching Club’ with the aim of creating 2015 new coaches by 2015. This will increase the overall coaching pool by 25%.

So, not only are they having a major and direct impact on the lives of those 2,015 coaches they train, who have now developed a new skill and will go on to expand a new area of their life, helping others and staying fit, being part of the community etc. but it also helps all those players that they will coach, not only improving health and fitness and rugby performance, but also instilling the values that are at the heart of the sport and giving many people a better life as a result.

This isn’t something that has just been done for the Tournament though. Nick Mott, Head of Sponsorship at QBE said “QBE Insurance and the RFU worked in partnership for three years to ensure that the building blocks were put in place to welcome new and returning players and keep them engaged in rugby for the long term.  Over the next four years QBE coaches will train over 50,000 players, share their knowledge with 4,000 other coaches and deliver over 1million hours of coaching. QBE is very proud that the Coaching Club is the first 2015 legacy programme to be delivered and of the positive impact these coaches will have across the country.”

The impact is profound and the emotional tie that those individuals will have with QBE will be strong. QBE can genuinely say that they are growing the sport of rugby, not just sponsoring it.  Three years of planning and another four years after the tournament, proves that they are committed to the sport and are not just fulfilling a contractual obligation.

 So, should all sponsors look to support the grassroots of their sport? Mott believes so but also has a word of caution to only do so where it would be relevant. 

“Brands should contribute where they can but more importantly where it is most appropriate. Our core business is managing risk and planning for when those risks may occur. Through the QBE Coaching Club we wanted to mitigate the risk of not having a coaching infrastructure in place that could harness the expected enthusiasm from the forthcoming tournament. Having the quantity and quality of rugby coaches in place through this initiative also helps reduce the risk of injury through safe coaching practices and techniques.” 

O2 – the Lead Partner of England Rugby – are developing the other side of the balance, participation. Their objective is to inspire 15,000 new people to play rugby through O2 Touch and they are ahead of target in having more than 10,000 people regularly playing by 2015.

O2 Touch is a joint partnership with the RFU providing funding for clubs to get started and then O2 giving them everything they need to host training and games, and to advertise their activity locally. The numbers involved have ramped up recently with Jonny Wilkinson taking part in an O2 Touch tour and associated advertising campaign.

They are introducing a much wider mix of people to the sport, improving their fitness, health and social life. The sessions are heavily O2 branded and are starting to include music, as their research has found people enjoy sport more if music is involved, and that fits nicely with O2’s brand. 

O2 have sponsored England Rugby for 21 years and the 02 Touch programme, which was developed after their 2012 renewal, is now one of the most, if not the most, important part of their activation.

Speaking to Gareth Griffiths, Head of Sport Sponsorship at O2, about the role legacy and development have in their sponsorship activation, he told Millharbour Marketing that “as we have been in the game for so long we feel a responsibility to grow the game”. They are investors in the sport and supporting Touch rugby allows them to target the widest possible audience. “It’s very inclusive and is very accessible, it’s mixed and you can play it anywhere, so it’s an accessible level of the game that we love.”

O2 have also been working on this grassroots activation for a number of years. These are not last minute thoughts to capture RWC interest; they are long-term plans. “The idea, back in 2012, was to make sure we were set up properly for the unquestionable rise in interest in participation as a result of the home nation tournament and it has been a couple of years of investment to get it to where it is now. It’s in great shape and we’re really excited to see where it’s going to go in the next few years.”

Griffiths was keen for other sponsors to consider grassroots support, but also said it has to be right for the brand “I’d always recommend it. It is a crucial part of what we are doing, but it depends on why a brand is getting involved in sponsorship. You have to do it for the right reasons, you have to be very focused on it and you need to know what you want to get out of it because if you do it wrong it’s not good. For us, the CSR element of our sponsorship in O2 Touch, is right at the heart of our England Rugby activation.”

O2 and QBE are making a difference to individuals, the sport as a whole and their brands. This is what sponsorship should be about.

Sophie Morris is a Chartered Marketer with 14 years’ marketing experience most recently at Director level in Financial Services. She led sponsorship of the Barbarians rugby team for 4 years and sits on the RWC2015 Legacy Committee and the RFUs Rugby Growth Committee. 

She started Millharbour Marketing to help companies be more strategic with their marketing and, in particular, sponsorship. She focuses on selecting, activating and integrating sponsorships with a strategic approach to ensure they deliver the desired return for clients.