Sports brands wishing to strike a sponsorship deal with Nissan have to meet five simple criteria, according to its chief marketer Roel de Vries, who said the Japanese car maker could strike future sponsorship deals in China and India.
De Vries was speaking at London’s Leaders Sport Business Summit about Nissan’s sponsorship portfolio.
De Vries, who said that Nissan turns down many sport sponsorship opportunities, said potential sports brand partners need to offer sponsorships which are engaging, best in field, do not alienate customers, are a good fit with Nissan and offer a clear return on investment.
Nissan has a wide-ranging sponsorship portfolio, including sponsorship of F1’s Red Bull through its Infiniti brand, Olympic sponsorship, sponsorship of U.S. college football, and UEFA Champions League sponsorship. De Vries said that "these sponsorships 'link to what we believe what our brand should stand for and what our customers love and believe in.'"
As part of its Champions League sponsorship, Nissan works with a number of global brand ambassadors: Paris St. Germain’s Thiago Silva, Man City’s Yaya Toure and Barcelona’s Andres Iniesta.
KEY FACTOR: De Vries said crucial to its sport sponsorship tie-ups was the additional factor that each offered the consumer the excitement of live sport, a key facet which he wanted Nissan to be associated with.
He said, “One interesting fact I think that summarizes it all. Live sports only takes about one percent of all the programming on television worldwide but generates 41 percent of all the Tweets worldwide. I think it shows the engagement that people have with live sport."
Nissan, De Vries stressed, could extend its portfolio into other sports, but was not actively in the market for sponsorship properties. Future possible sponsorships could be struck in India and China, according to de Vries.
He also touched on the rise of data and its influence on impacting the marketing of brands, which he said could have a negative impact. De Vries: "What worries me about data is that 80 percent of decisions we make are purely emotional. You can analyze millions of things. There is such a hunger to justify hundreds of millions of dollars that we spend, such a hunger to get the formula."
John Reynolds is a writer in London.
