Funny old game: taking a shot at team sponsorship

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1 Vet Times The website for the veterinary profession Funny old game: taking a shot at team sponsorship Author : ANGUS KIRK Categories : Business Date : December 1, 2011 Football and veterinary surgery do not seem the most obvious marriage, but what if you could get national TV exposure for your business? Shirt sponsorship proved the perfect forum for one manager to market his practice. LET ME TELL you about my life in football. My relationship with Lincoln City Football Club started one dark cold December evening in I was nine and a bit naïve about football. Of course Sky Sports was not around and the only football on TV was the FA Cup final and Match of the Day on Saturday night, generally too late for me to stay up. My brother and his mates decided it was time I experienced the essence of the beautiful game and dragged me away from the TV to catch the football bus to Lincoln. We arrived at the ground and bought a programme only to discover the match had been postponed. I should have taken the hint then. We went back the following week and I recall standing in the dark at the back of the terrace behind the goal, bright lights on the pitch, watching real football for the first time. Since then I have been an avid fan of the Red Imps, with a few ups and a lot more downs than I care to remember. Those of you who are football fans will understand what it means to support a club through thick and thin, those of you who are not will think we are plain stupid; spending a small fortune travelling around the country in all weathers, in the hope that we win more than we lose. Under the late, great Keith Alexander, Lincoln reached the League Two play-off finals at Cardiff on two occasions. I was bursting with pride and all the years of heartache were worth it for those 1/9

2 precious memories. Lincoln City is my team, it always will be, and I have even inflicted it on my sons. Changing relationships Now that I am a veterinary practice owner my relationship with football has changed. I have used the business as an excuse to sponsor matches, inviting business associates to matches, as a thank you mainly, and treating them to a VIP day at Sincil Bank. I have advertised at the ground and I am proud to see my business name at a stadium I have frequented on Saturday afternoons and midweek evenings for more than 30 years. At one game, where KirksVets were the matchball sponsors, I got talking to the commercial manager at the club, Tim, who I have got to know quite well over the years. I can t recall how, but we started discussing shirt sponsorship and I said I would love to see KV on the front of the Lincoln shirt. I knew it would be out of my league financially, but I still fished for an idea of the cost. In the end I named a price that I would be comfortable with paying for such an honour and did not think any more of it. A couple of months later I received a call from Tim and he said the price I had mentioned would be very close to securing sponsorship for the back of the away shirt. My initial reaction was that this would not be a good investment and very different to being on the front of the home shirt, but that I would think about it. After initially being dismissive I began to think of the implications of undertaking such an investment and spoke to my accountant, who is also a football fan (well, Derby County), to get a more objective opinion as I felt my red and white glasses were affecting my judgement. To my surprise he thought it was reasonable value as long as I included plenty of extras, so I decided to make a list of demands and after a bit of negotiation the club and I came to an agreement. Exposure When I first considered sponsorship there were lots of opportunities to advertise, such as the television exposure. Highlights and goals are shown on two separate national programmes each week, plus at least two regional TV programmes. On top of that there was the internet where there are several places the action can be seen with the potential of seeing the KirksVets logo on a minimum of 23 match days. Local and national papers carry photos of players in action where the logo can be seen. The most common type of photo is several players celebrating a goal, more often than not this includes at least one back of shirt shot. 2/9

3 Another major avenue for marketing is replica shirt sales. Lincoln City stocks a minimum of 700 replica away kits, plus a third kit although I am not sure how many of these will be produced. Football fans like to show their colours and buy the replica shirts to wear at matches or as everyday leisure clothing. A popular shirt will be worn and seen several years after the shirt was produced. I think the new kit will be popular and the colour really does fit well with my business logo. This is important as some sponsors logos can spoil a shirt, but in this case I think they work well together. Lincoln wear a second strip for every away game, this allows them to sell advertising space on both the home and away shirts, so they have a sponsor for the front of home shirt, back of away shirt and the shorts. The same spaces can then be sold on the away kit, allowing more sponsorship income for the club, or alternatively breaking down the desired income from sponsorship into smaller amounts allowing more companies to be able to afford this kind of advertising. If the second kit clashes with the home team a third kit exists for the team to wear. The back of an away shirt is obviously cheaper than the front of the away shirt and away kit sponsorship is cheaper than the home kit, so back of away shirt is the fourth biggest sponsor for the kits. For me, being a huge Lincoln fan, it will mean a great deal to see the shirts worn on the terraces, in the stands, on the streets and on the pitch with my business logo in full view. In conjunction with the shirts I will have pitch-side advertising boards, again allowing for the possibility of TV and photographic coverage. The KirksVets KV and cat will now be a prominent feature at home games and I have arranged to have promotional material in the boardroom and executive boxes. This targets businesses and although we do not normally do much work business to business, there is the potential to advertise to business executives and their staff, who may or may not have animals themselves but I am sure they will know someone who does. Now I don t know, but I am guessing it is not that common for someone to go to a football match thinking I must find a new vet, but the chances are quite a high percentage of the crowd are animal owners, have friends who are animal owners, or even work commercially with animals through farming, kennels or dog walking. This is all about product placement, so when they need a vet they will subconsciously think of our KV logo. Announcement I am writing this article two days after the sponsorship announcement, where I appeared on the club website, in the local paper and on the newspaper s website. I have received comments from friends, had new followers on Twitter and (to my amusement) been the subject of three pages on one fan s message board and nearly a whole page on another. Fame indeed. Football message 3/9

4 boards should not be taken too seriously but a sample of comments vary from Well done Angus for supporting the club to We must be going to the dogs if the best sponsor we can get is a vets! Plus one fan who, due to his loyalty to the club, will now have to change vets to us. Publicity As a result of the publicity, I have already had a chat with the managing director of another sponsor a builders merchants and due to our new relationship as major sponsors in Lincoln City we have spoken about preferential costs for a building project I have planned later in the year. The next step from there is the club staff and the board of directors, who will of course want to demonstrate that advertising with the club is effective and will either use our services themselves or help promote us to others through that most important of all advertising, word of mouth. The directors are generally welloff individuals, business owners or business representatives who have the potential to promote my business to colleagues and staff. I am sure that even if you are not a football fan, most people will, at some time or other, have seen a post-match interview with a player or a football press conference to make a major announcement for the club. In the background there is nearly always a whiteboard carrying logos of the club s major sponsors. Now there will be a KV on that board for Lincoln City. Every home match programme will carry photos of the previous game s man of the match awards and the match ball sponsors awards, which will be in front of the sponsors board; plus I will have advertising in the programme each game, which can be changed from week to week. Due to the package I negotiated I am fairly sure everyone who has an interest in Lincoln City Football Club will be aware of KirksVets. That is, the supporters attending games (last season this number varied from just under 3,000 to 8,000 per game), people who read the local paper s sport pages, fans looking at the club website (I will be able to use the official club website to make any major promotional announcements during the season), those buying the programme, buying replica shirts (Christmas sees lots of non-football fans in the club shop buying presents) and anyone attending special events at the ground, such as bonfire night. Relegation My sponsorship of Lincoln City could go either way. Some new business will be achieved, but will it be enough to justify the financial outlay? Well that really comes down to success on the pitch a play-off finish can lead to a live televised final, a cup run could see the shirt at a premiership ground, again with the potential for national TV coverage. When I was negotiating the deal Lincoln were fairly safe in League Two. Then a disastrous run of 4/9

5 results and only two points taken from the final 11 games, meant Lincoln slipped out of the Football League. This was a disaster both for the club and myself as a supporter. Lincoln need my support more than ever, but there is a silver lining to this cloud. The drop into the Blue Square Premier league means we have three or four local derbies, which guarantees higher attendances at these matches and an increase in local interest. It also means we will be one of the big boys in a smaller league, which adds interest and more opportunity for live TV slots reserved for that league. The downside is losing regular weekly TV coverage, though Lincoln City was featured by the Sky Sports Premier subscription channel in three live matches over the first two months of this season. For those who say its just a game, the sad truth of relegation is that those staff who work hard in the offices in every department face redundancy due to the fall in income. These are the unsung heroes who work tirelessly in the background and become victims of poor player performances. I am hopeful my investment in the club will help towards rebuilding the team and be rewarded by the added exposure both locally and nationally. You never know, the next time I am recruiting for a new vet the KV logo may just be familiar enough to attract a few additional applicants. 5/9

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7 Angus Kirk (right) with Lincoln City chairman Steve Prescott at Sincil Bank, home of Lincoln City FC. 7/9

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