Sponsorships - making it meaningful!

An article I recently read in one of the local business dailies got me thinking about sponsorships. Sponsors are a key stakeholder in any MICE event and their contributions (financial and otherwise) go a long way in aiding event organisers/hosts to cover event costs. With the increased scope of media coverage afforded to MICE events and the pervasive use of search engines to pull up news clips and photographs, the life-span of sponsorship branding has extended into years. This provides a very strong selling point for purveyors of sponsorship packages.

However, it is not enough for organisations to simple sponsor a MICE event. The real and high incremental value of sponsorship participation comes when a sponsor capitalises on opportunities to leverage on the sponsorship:
- gaining direct access to a group of potential clientele (in a single event), who under normal circumstances would required multiple efforts spread across an extended time frame to reach
- gaining VIP treatment for its own group of top customers during the course of the event (scoring brownie points)
- dovetailing its marketing activities to add on to what the organiser is already doing to promote, brand and market the event
- ensuring that its participating staff are adequately and properly briefed on its sponsorship objectives and are proactive in ensuring these objectives are fulfilled (if not exceeded)

Organisations which actively sponsor major sporting events have become quite adept at leveraging on the sponsorship. This same level and intensity should be applied to MICE events. No event is too small that it cannot help improve a relationship the sponsor has with at least one of its existing customers or potential customer.

Sponsors need to move away from viewing MICE events sponsorships as branding exercises, to exploring how they can better connect with their customers (or potential customers) during the course of the event. Treat sponsorships as opportunities to carry out one-to-one marketing; networking; customer relationship building.......this will go a long way in increasing the return on investment for any kind of MICE event sponsorship.

Benjamin Cassim
Temasek Poly