Vodafone has the right touch

By IRENE CHAPPLE

The commentators are bordering on hysterical. "Geeve me some meedicine," screeches one as Warriors captain Stacey Jones breaks through the defence and sets up another try. "Just watch the leedle general go!" Ivan Cleary sweeps up the ball and plants it behind the goalposts. The commentator must be falling to his knees, apoplectic: "Eeet's a try!"

In the background, you can imagine the excitement of the Vodafone marketers.

From loser underdogs the Vodafone Warriors became every marketer's dream as they climbed to the top of the heap this season.

The cry could come straight from the boardrooms of the telco giant: "It's another cracker for the Vodafone corporate brand!" They gasp. "We're backing a winning team, cementing our image as youthful, spontaneous and cool!"

Vodafone's four-year contract expires this year and the company is busy negotiating a new deal.

The original was signed in 1998, when Telecom had a monopoly over New Zealand's telco market, the Spice Girls had just lost Ginger and the Warriors were embarrassing.

When the Warriors changed ownership in 2000 - the same year they lurked near the bottom of the NRL table - Vodafone could have deserted the contract.

Instead, they reaffirmed the sponsorship rights.

Vodafone's "single-minded proposition" for the sponsorship, it explained in an awards entry the next year, was "unconditional support".

That theme was backed by a campaign titled Matter of Faith, and included the launch of a song by the same name. The media strategy, according the report, was to show support irrespective of results.

By last year the Warriors were having a better run. The awards entry showed an awareness of Vodafone's association with the Warriors peaked at 69 per cent during the season, with the Matter of Faith public relations campaign launch reaching 1.8 million people, and achieving the equivalent advertising value of $260,000.

It was supported by Vodafone services including text voting competitions and the Red Hands distributed at games.

The Warriors are Vodafone's biggest expense in a sponsorship portfolio that includes the Silver Ferns, the Football Kingz and NPC teams. The sponsorship spend, including leverage costs and charity support, is understood to be about $6 million - a quarter of Vodafone's estimated $25 million marketing budget.

That is seen as comparatively high, but, as Auckland University student Simon Cliffe concluded in his master's thesis on Vodafone's tactics, it had been a wildly successful marketing strategy.

While it is notoriously hard to track sponsorship for a strict financial return on investment figure, Cliffe's case study attributed a large part of the telco's successful push into New Zealand to such tactics.

Vodafone was a particularly attractive study option, as it came into New Zealand with a clean slate in marketing and consumer perceptions.

In 1998 it had 150,000 subscribers, and by last year its customer base was just over 1 million. Brand awareness leapt from 3 to 98 per cent in 6 months and is now close to 100 per cent.

Cliffe's research showed the sponsorship was effective in building a personality. Focus groups, said Cliffe, "were able to vividly describe the Vodafone brand as a young person with personality characteristics such as intelligent, outgoing, exciting and spontaneous ... and saw the sponsorships as an influential driver of this".

Consumers liked Vodafone's support of the Warriors as the team was seen as struggling.

That added to the goodwill, a key reason for corporates to throw money at sponsorship.

Cliffe said his research showed the strategy had worked so well that consumers felt like they were left out if they weren't a customer.

According to Vodafone sponsorship manager Lynley Kirk-Smith, the company's strength in sponsorship is that it has focused on more than just the bottom line.

"We don't enter into sponsorship with the idea of a strict financial relationship," she said.

"We have the emotional connections."

Internationally, sponsorship is gaining importance as a marketing tactic. While figures are not collated in New Zealand, Britain experienced a 4.5 per cent increase during the last year in sports sponsorship spend, compared with a slump in display advertising.

Increasingly, corporates want the "feel-good factor" on a budget, and sponsorship is becoming the new marketing basic.