Why the future of sports sponsorship is in our hands
With the industry still reeling from high-profile sponsorship deals gone sour for Netball Australia, Cricket Australia and the AFL, War on Single Use Plastic (WOSUP) co-founder and CEO Martin Salter explains why live sport is ripe for value-led change.
Over the last few years, there has been a shift in the way brands do business.
Little by little, sports brands have realised that customers no longer deal solely in dollars: they want a value exchange. They need their brands and institutions to reflect their own value system. And if they didn’t? Well, they’d simply take their money elsewhere.
And so, for a brand to ignore its customers’ values and ideals these days is simply marketing suicide. Take last year’s Qatar World Cup as a prime example, which saw brands and sponsors pulling out left, right, and centre. Most recently, the Fédération International de Football Association (FIFA) cancelled sponsorship plans with Saudi Arabia’s state tourism authority, Visit Saudi, for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, following public backlash on human rights grounds.
