Core, Ireland’s largest marketing communications company, has launched a new National Sponsorship Index (NSI) which provides a benchmark for sponsorship effectiveness.
According to Core, the NSI sets a new national standard for sponsorship, weighted against commercial impact and rated by the fans. Measuring the vitality, potency and effectiveness of the Top 50 sponsorships in Ireland, the research brings transparency to Ireland’s sponsorship market and shows how sponsorship drives positive business metrics. The NSI is the result of three years of development, testing and analysis by Core, in conjunction with Dr. Tony Meenaghan, Professor of Marketing at the Smurfit Graduate School of Business in UCD and Ireland’s foremost expert in the area of commercial sponsorship.
The Top Three sponsorships in the inaugural National Sponsorship Index are Electric Ireland’s sponsorship of Pieta House’s Darkness into Light initiative; SuperValu’s sponsorship of the Tidy Towns competition and Aviva’s sponsorship of the Aviva Stadium.
A total of 19 sports sponsorships make it into the Top 50 including Vodafone’s IRFU sponsorship (5th), Heineken’s sponsorship of the European Rugby Championship (6th), SuperValu’s GAA sponsorship (7th), Three’s sponsorship of the FAI (9th) and AIB’s sponsorship of the All Ireland Club Championship.
In addition 11 music sponsorships, 10 culture, five cause and community and five venue sponsorships also make it into the Top 50.
According to Core, “this non-partisan analysis of the sponsorship market provides marketers with intelligence into sponsorship impact across different business sectors, sponsorship genres and a range of consumer demographics, thus arming marketers with the information they need to understand sponsorship impact on a national scale. Research assists marketers to drive increased commercial benefits and the National Sponsorship Index specifically provides clarity as to which levers drive commercial impact in sponsorship and how to maximise the effectiveness of these levers. By pinpointing where sponsorship is delivering for a brand and providing clarity on how commercial impacts can be enhanced and maximised, the index will empower better and more commercially impactful decisions within the Irish sponsorship industry. The index shows that sponsorships can have an uplifting impact on commercial metrics (+30% growth in performance), and outlines how that uplift is more than doubled (71%) when consumers feel that their experience has been enhanced and / or a benefit has been transferred to the property itself.”
“We have been working on this initiative for almost three years and our aim was to help solve a key challenge for marketers – to demonstrate the commercial impact of sponsorship for Irish brands and to understand how these impacts can be unlocked. We have determined not only that sponsorship has a proven impact on brand metrics, but exactly how to quantify this impact and understand the levers that drive it.
“Our National Sponsorship Index demonstrates that sponsorship has positive impacts on both propensity to purchase and long-term affinity, which are regarded as key metrics for any sponsor. Different categories of brands, properties and fan bases, lead to different levels of commercial impacts, but overall the better a sponsorship is activated, the larger the commercial returns are,” according to Jill Downey, Managing Director of Core Sponsorship.
