Here Jon Badger, a veteran of the sports sponsorship world with over 17 years’ experience and now working at Coventry Building Society provides the business point of view.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. Sponsorship is integral, not interruptive. If instead of disrupting the action with yet more ads you weave your brand into these key cultural moments, you’re more likely to drive up key attributes like sentiment or willingness to recommend.

In a great partnership, equity should always be a two-way street where you borrow the best bits from each other and help shape that strategy together.

At Coventry Building Society we sponsor the 13 Valleys Ultra trail running event. Why that property? What made that a great partnership? It all comes down to understanding our brand and our audience on a deeper level.

Our brand is built on the belief that saving for your sunny days can be just as important as saving for your rainy days. The key insight being that people are sacrificing experiences and togetherness to save for their rainy days, and that can impact quality of life and mental health. Meanwhile a core audience for us are the over 50s, a group who are frequently misrepresented in advertising. We wanted to be the brand to show we get the over 50s, that they enjoy themselves in ways that might surprise you. With trail running and the 13 Valleys Ultra we found that there’s a big over index in terms of over 50s participants, who are there to push themselves and come together as one community. Our brand and their audience in deep alignment.

But that desire to show we really understand our customers doesn’t just stop with our choice of partnership, but also how we activate it.

We created the Coventry Building Society Run Club, where we gave a big group of runners the opportunity to sign a contract on the day of the event to be a professional runner. We paid their entry fee and their expenses. We gave them official kit. We gave out massages. We gave out smoothies. All to give participants a boost on their big day. Every single aspect of the partnership was designed to celebrate and enable that running community.

Actively investing in building meaningful connections like these, demonstrates your difference. But you can’t do that without understanding, at a very granular level, who your audience are, what motivates them and what’s important to them.

Shared equity like this starts from aligned values. When at npower, one of the best first meetings I had with a rights holder was with Wigan Warriors. They didn’t present a laundry list of rights like minutes of LEDs, a spot on the shirt and so on. Instead, they wanted to know what was important to us as a brand? What were our campaigns? How did we want to be seen? And then they went away and worked up a rights package which directly answered that. I think that the more you take this bespoke approach, the more likely you are to get the alignment of values and what’s important to each other.

These ideas of values and purpose are increasingly important, but it’s our job as brands, not only to harness these, but to do so in ways which still spark attention and imagination. Because communities have got better at spotting tired, tick box exercises; if something’s superficial, if it isn’t done with genuine passion, authentic intent, creativity and an alignment of values then communities will see straight through it and it won’t last. Which goes against the whole point of purpose campaigns and of genuine partnerships.

The industry has gone through a vast amount of change, no more so than around social media and technology, and what we can do in that sense. But for me, there are three principles that never change, which are: stand out, stand for, and stand firm.

‘Stand out’ because we’re subject to 1000s of brands every single day. So first and foremost you must stand out from the crowd and get people’s attention.

‘Stand for’ is about using sponsorship as a vehicle and a platform for your positioning and your values.

‘Stand firm’ by being in for the long term. Realistically there may be no such thing as brand loyalty, but fans can spot brand authenticity, and they can spot something that’s a flash in the pan or just a notional gesture. So with sponsorships, as with all the best relationships, you should commit and commit for the long term.