The Los Angeles Dodgers recently beat the New York Yankees 7-6 in Game 5 to win the World Series 4 games to 1. But does it matter? The 18.6 million US television viewers seemed to think it does.
On the same night, Tottenham Hotspur bested Manchester City 2-1 to advance in the Carabao Cup in front of 60,000+ fans. The score seemed to matter to most of them.
In sports, plain and simple, you have to score to win. But sponsorship is different.
Sponsorship is less about ‘winning’ and more about progress… which is deemed as ‘success’, and success requires performance. The goal isn’t to score or to ‘win’ per se. The goal is to perform well – to deliver value to the brand or business.
Most of us also recognise that the ability to deliver a quality performance – whether in sport or sponsorship or anything else – requires engagement in a ‘process.’ In sport that process involves physical training, skill development, tactical planning, teamwork, leadership, etc.
In sponsorship, the process is a bit different. It involves brand alignment, strategic clarity, and the setting and weighting of clear objectives and KPIs… which is where it gets a bit tricky.
Getting clarity and agreement on objectives and KPIs (or OKRs as some might call them) involves the stating of a quantifiable opinion which is shared with stakeholders. And this opinionated sharing invariably spawns debate. This is the hard and sometimes uncomfortable work, but also the most fruitful.
Rarely are all sponsorship stakeholders precisely aligned from the outset. Sometimes the differences of strategic opinion are significant… and the road to agreement can be bumpy. It’s easy to shy away from this bumpy ride, but that’s a mistake. Rigorous debate about sponsorship objectives and KPIs is precisely the deep engagement in the ‘process’ that actually drives the best performance and the greatest positive impact from the partnership. The debate is the secret sauce. It’s key to the process.
So, if it’s the process that matters, how do we best ignite the process? How do we get everyone engaged? That’s right. This is where we started… with the score.
The score itself isn’t the aim, but the scoring framework or ‘scorecard’ is the instigator of the process. If we don’t set up to keep score, the process often gets a wide berth. We avoid the hard work and give it ‘the swerve.’
If the Yankees and Dodgers just got together for a couple hours to throw and hit and catch and run but nobody kept score, how many people would watch? Sure, there are always the die-hards that turn up early for batting practice, but you wouldn’t get 18.6 million watching. The score makes it matter… and makes the players better.
Similarly we are all familiar with the school report card. Why do we need this? It’s the lectures and labs that do the teaching, so why do we need the report card? It’s partly because we all want to know how our kids are doing, but more importantly it gives them the incentive to engage in the learning process. The scorecard drives the process.
So where does that leave us on sponsorship? The best and most impactful sponsorships are using a scorecard framework to help them get the most out of their sponsorships. Some do it well, but many are leaving too much value on the table by essentially dodging ‘the process.’ They don’t really want to know the score.
And to be clear, simply setting a few objectives isn’t enough. Proper scorekeeping requires a clear view of ‘what success looks like.’ How will you know if you have sufficiently increased brand awareness? What is the specific metric (or KPI) that will indicate a successful improvement in brand perception? How will you be keeping score?
In sport it’s obvious that the specifics of the scoring system must be clear before you start to play. Each goal counts as one. Most goals at the end of play is the winner. OK, let’s go. You can’t wait until the end of the game to define the scoring system. You can’t decide at the end of the game to count second half goals as double value… and you can’t have each team pick their own scoring system.
The same principles hold true for sponsorship. If you don’t know the scoring system it’s pretty hard to win the game, or to even know if you’re performing well. And if there is no score, is the game even worth playing?
Sponsorship is too important and too expensive not to be properly leveraged, and that requires rigorous scoring. Let’s get in the game. Let’s know the score.
Game on!
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