The realm of Naming Rights and Corporate Sponsorship has recently seen a rise in the union of sports and smartphone providers. Increasingly, smartphone providers have joined in corporate sponsorship of sports franchises in an attempt to try and capture part of the fan base through content-driven marketing agendas.
In the case of this week’s announcement of the sponsorship deal between Samsung Canada and the NHL, the marketing angle comes in the form of exclusive access for Samsung users to videos and footage from discussions held in NHL’s “Situation Room” that is not available to iPhone and BlackBerry users.
Samsung hopes that NHL fan avidity will translate into mobile fidelity as fans switch to their smartphones in search of an enhanced Hockey experience.
“We love for people to switch off of a competitor’s platform,” says Paul Brannen, Samsung Canada’s senior vice president of mobile solutions. “It’s become an interesting race in the mobile space. If I can create a compelling reason for you to switch off that platform to my platform, it’s beneficial for us.”
According to Peter Widdis, a marketing professor at George Brown College, sports fans are less affected by sponsorship logos but they gain a tremendous connection to sponsorships that they can experience. This is why Widdis suggests that a technology manufacturer is uniquely positioned to facilitate the type of sponsorship present in the Samsung/NHL partnership.
To see more about how creating customer value relates to upping brand value see the original article here:
http://www.thestar.com/business/sportonomics/2015/03/09/new-nhl-deal-is-heavy-on-content.html
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-Erin Beaudoin