Sponsorship: Not such a Cinch!

Whilst a day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing or hearing about Cazoo or Cinch at some sports event or festival, I do question the sponsorship heavy strategy of these two new kids
 in the very competitive used car sector.
 

If you’re not familiar with their investments in sponsorship here’s a quick summary of the last few weeks, we’ve had:

For the rest of July there are multiple music festivals, golf, more cricket, more rugby and even fishing.

 As far as I can ascertain these two new brands are sponsoring at least 20 teams, events or championships and I’d estimate they must be spending in excess of $100m combined on rights fees.
 

On top of this they’re amplifying their investments and spending heavily on broadcast, print,
 OOH and digital advertising.
 

When I consider the capabilities of sponsorship (i.e. what it can achieve) against the
 business challenges faced by these two new brands, with their entirely new propositions, I
 keep asking myself:

 How on earth can this level of investment in sponsorship be an effective and efficient use
 of marketing $’s?

 Sure they’ve got deep pockets and just maybe their sponsorship investments helped to
 support their recent funding rounds. But beyond this?

 It’s my view that their scatter gun approach, where they’ve labelled multiple disconnected
 assets with no obvious connection to their category, is more wishful thinking than
 strategic.

 Sponsorship will not deliver the scope of messaging required to catch attention, increase
 understanding of what they do, how they do it and why theirs is a better alternative to your
 local car dealer or one of the established used car retail groups.

 The sheer volume of brand exposure they’ve achieved through their sponsorship
 investments may have made us more aware of their names when we’re prompted to recall
 them by a market researcher.
 ​
 This though is not enough. Because this level of expenditure requires significantly more than
 some prompted recall.

 Have these investments made us any more familiar with their proposition? Or made the
 brands more likeable? Or made us feel closer to them? Or more likely to consider them
 compared to the established market?

 Whilst I can’t answer all of these questions, as I’ve not run a category focussed tracker, I can
 report, using You Gov’s most popular brand data for Q1 ’22 data that it appears to be a bit
 of a mixed picture:

 In isolation this looks positive. More people have heard of them, as expected, and their
 likeability, which is a gateway measure for sponsorship, has increased.

 However, let’s not forget that this is a very competitive market. As such we must consider
 the competition.

 Here are two of the established brands whose marketing budgets combined are a fraction of
 those of either of the new kids on the block.
 

 Based on these numbers it seems that the new kids have achieved a higher level of
 promoted recall and it’s growing at a faster rate.

 They’re not there with likeability and worryingly likeability is not increasing any faster than
 the competition. Which suggests the sponsorship is doing little beyond providing visibility.
 

Worse still - the established brands have net likeability scores (people who like v people
 who dislike the brand) of 14% & 16% - which are significantly higher numbers than the new
 kids of +5% & -3%!

 Not a great return from $100,000,000’s of investment!

 Of course you could argue that I’m being overly harsh. They’re new brands. They’re
 disruptors. They’ve got to invest big. They need time. Blah blah blah

Well yes, I agree. But they have to invest smart and this is where their strategy for sponsorship and therefore marketing appears flawed.
 ​
 Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that these two brands realise that this level of
 sponsorship investment is not the answer to their particular problems at the moment.

 More emphasis on sponsorship might be right further down the line – but for these two it
 might be too late!

 Ian Thompson
 Independent Sponsorship Auditor and Strategist