TENNIS
SELLING
TENNIS
Making its name synonymous with tennis in this country has proved an ace for financial services company, AEGON. Kath Hudson finds out more about the mutually-beneficial deal
S
port sponsorship is up there with advertising, sales promotion and PR as a way of creating aware- ness and building a brand. In
fact, AEGON’s head of brand, sponsor- ship and communications, Jayne Ponzio, argues that it might be more effective. Now in the second year of AEGON’s
sponsorship agreement with British Ten- nis, Ponzio has been delighted with the way the partnership is helping to build AEGON’s brand, which, despite being one of the world’s leading insurance groups, was not widely recognised by the public before its link-up with the sport.
Helping to draw talent through grassroots into the development system
“When we were looking to raise the
brand’s profile, we looked into all the traditional marketing routes,” she says. “Looking back, in order to bring the lev- el of name awareness to our preferred peer group would have cost three times as much as what the Lawn Tennis Asso- ciation (LTA) sponsorship has achieved. “Both the LTA and AEGON were at a
stage where we were repositioning our individual brands, so there were huge amounts of synergy and we could really relate to each other,” Ponzio explains. “Our partnership is continually evolving into a mutual beneficial situation.”
SWEATING THE ASSETS
The LTA signed a five-year ‘blanket’ sponsorship deal with AEGON in Sep- tember 2008 – an emerging trend among sports bodies. Elsewhere Brit- ish Gas is the main sponsor for British Swimming and Sky is starting to hold a prominent position with British Cycling. The LTA’s commercial director, Bruce
Philipps, explains the thinking behind the decision to redirect the commer- cial programme to dealing with just one sponsor: “Financially we felt that we weren’t achieving as much as we could. We were selling off bits and pieces of the sport, so the costs of servicing that were high. With all the changes we had made to British Tennis we wanted a partner who could bring all that together and this is where AEGON has played a huge part. We wanted to attract a lead part- ner across the whole sport – including community tennis and our junior pro- grammes – not just individual elements, such as the Queen’s Club Tournament.” Although it was obviously more of a
challenge to attract one lead sponsor, Philipps acknowledges there was some luck with the timing of the sponsorship deal. “Fortunately we started the sales drive a good period before the economic downturn – although we made the an- nouncement on the day that Lehman
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