Over the past eight years, SLRG has conducted a significant amount of activation efficacy research at sporting events. One of the most common themes we have observed is the significant impact that best of breed messaging and contextual relevance around a sports property can have in driving consumer recall, awareness, and positive association of an activating brand compared to its competitive set. Our preference for deployment of well constructed, sponsor blind experimental design, enables us and our clients to isolate and measure the impact of the specific activation, absent any other marketing mix elements, and the results have consistently been impressive. However, in an environment where sports marketing ROO is often measured longitudinally, the question has surfaced regarding the longevity of impact of these activations. Ie..Do people still remember what they learned after a lapse of time?
Some recent work in support of a major college sports sponsor afforded us the opportunity to not only test the short term results of the sponsor’s activation, but to continue to track that impact and strength of the event itself. Here, we created a longitudinal component to our research design, where we administered multiple waves of post activation research across the same in-game fan base, to assess the magnitude of fall off in recall, awareness and positive brand association for the activating sponsor. Upon analyzing results from the later research waves, conducted several weeks after the activation, we were pleased and intrigued to see that the brand we tested achieved proper brand association and brand equity was maintained at similarly high levels to that observed in the short-term test. While certainly the breadth of this sponsors’ activation clearly contributed to the strong results, our findings support our hypothesis that good in-event marketing has more than a fleeting impact. SLRG has evolved its methodology around these tests to allow for an efficient and customized on site and post event testing program that can help both properties and sponsoring brands gather deep insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their activation. Click here to learn more about how we can do this for you.