Sports and brands are synonymous with one another. The Boston Red Sox are known for the famous Citgo signs that resides beyond the Green Monster. The University of Oregon goes hand-in-hand with apparel and shoe giant Nike, and the University of North Carolina is tightly associated with  the jump man himself and the Jordan Brand logo that graces its uniforms. There is no doubt that brands have made a lasting impact on fan bases everywhere thanks to sports.

“Brands have a really interesting opportunity to actually create traditions around game day that are synonymous with the brands and finding things that are meaningful to the brands and become great traditions. A carpet company rolling out the carpet for a team to enter the field, or a particular sign being reminiscent of the kind of offering that a company can bring, or a sponsor of a particular segment or kind of content that becomes part of a game tradition.” 

But how brands become one with a university is a sticky topic. It requires identifying the right fit between brand and school or sport, implementing a proper strategy, and activating the sponsorship at the right time. With another year of collegiate athletics around the corner, Jennifer Davis, the CMO at Learfield, joined the show to discuss how the company brings big partnerships to life between brands and universities. Plus she explains how sports marketing has become a much more integral piece of the overall sales funnel. Enjoy this episode!

Main Takeaways

• Branding 101: Brands need to view sponsorship opportunities as a way to not only build gameday traditions with fan bases, but also as an opportunity to align your brand with the university and become synonymous with it. By building out these activations, whether it’s a highlight sponsorship, player of the game, or in-game sponsorship, you are creating memorable moments with fans, generating brand awareness, but most importantly, you are organically aligning your product with the university.
• Let’s Get Specific: As traditional broadcast mediums have changed, it’s afforded brands to take advantage of targeting specific markets with ad inventories. Instead of just placing a commercial spot across multiple networks, schools can now work with companies to identify specific markets outside of their home base to target, which could help lead to future conversions.
• You’re Now Free to Pre-Board: Any CMO who is about to take on a new role with a company should design their own pre-boarding/onboarding strategy. Rather than stick to the predetermined path a company has always used for onboarding, this could be an opportunity to take the initiative to meet with key stakeholders in the company to understand where you can best serve the company once you start.

Key Quotes:

“​​The real emphasis for me has been really understanding who the hero of our story is, who is the buyer, the customer, the influencer of making our business run, and then matching the right solutions to that.”

“Create your own onboarding plan — especially at the senior level. Coming in at an executive level to an organization, companies tend to fall down at the executive level because they tend to not put executives into the same camps as other employees. So it’s very important to have a plan for success and to create what many call a strategic imperative.”

“One of the things that is a huge unlock of value that I did this time was pre-boarding. Prior to my official start date, I got a list of key stakeholders and key collaborators within the company and I scheduled meetings with them before I started.”

“Brands have a really interesting opportunity to actually create traditions around gameday that are synonymous with the brands and finding things that are meaningful to the brands and become great traditions.” 

“We think about decisions as a choice of binary — yes, no, pro, and con. In my experience in business, the decision is not the finish line. It’s a starting line. The value of any decision that you make happens because of everything that happens after. Smart leaders will identify what decisions need to be made. They’ll make it as quickly as they can with the best information they have available and are building an organization that can execute well and make their decisions.”

“We’ve certainly seen people take that lens to say, ‘How could I treat this as a national platform to get my brand out there and to engage with fans?’ We’ve also seen the reverse, where maybe a local credit union will have a relationship with the university, and through their analysis of their customer base and our analysis of our fan base have determined that there are a lot of Wisconsin fans that don’t live in the shadow of the stadium. They’re not in their home state, but they live in California, or they live in New York, or they live in Texas and they could very potentially be customers of this credit union or customers of other brands that have that affiliation with the school. We’ve seen that reverse where a company who wants a national reach is using college, their affiliation with a particular school or a group of schools  to go national. Being able to tailor the programs to the individual needs of the brands is part of the secret sauce that we can bring to bear.”

“Imagine the simplified marketing and sales funnel of awareness, consideration and preference down to loyalty — we have offerings that hit every single one of those. We’ve spent decades perfecting that, but we have added to it over the years with more, and more offerings that take the brand lower and lower into the funnel with engaged fans.”

Bio

​​Jennifer Davis is a creative and motivational marketing executive, who currently serves as the Chief Marketing and Communications officer for Learfield and is writing a book on business decision making. Previously, she headed up product marketing for the fast-growing Training and Certification business at Amazon Web Services (AWS) She has deep leadership experience steering digital transformation through organic and inorganic business growth for both entrepreneurial start-ups and Fortune 500 organizations. She has been a Forbes contributor and started her career writing installers for a software company.  Background includes P&L responsibility, business development, product strategy, brand management, as well as leading and inspiring cross-functional and global teams to high performance in growing organizations.

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