CorpComms Magazine

Hardly a month passes these days without a flash of light bulbs, a golden envelope and an award ceremony full of glamorous stars milling around on a red carpet. One moment, it's the best book; the next, the best film. Milling behind the celebrities are boards with corporate branding and icons, and attached to the prize are numerous corporate names.

But does the public even know or care what the sponsors really do as a business? What is the communication strategy behind prize sponsorship, and does it really work?

Orange, part of the French Telecom g roup, ha s been involved in prize sponsorship of film and literature for over a decade and sees it as an essential marketing activity.

Hattie Evans, head of film at Orange, considers the company's involvement very much part of its corporate strategy. For twelve years the group has sponsored the high-profile Orange Prize for Fiction - an award created specifically to celebrate women's fiction writing - and the Orange Award for New Writers.

This year, it has renamed these to the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers, and introduced the Orange Broadband Reader's Award, where people can vote for their favourite novel by one of the writers shortlisted for either of the other two awards. On the film side, Orange supports Bafta, where it has been the main sponsor since 2000. This year, it introduced a viewer's vote, Orange Rising Star, which went to Bond girl Eva Green. Evans says sponsorship of prizes is 'absolutely' necessary to make an emotional connection and to engage with customers, new and old. 'It is to do with brand awareness,' she explains. 'It's a fantastic way to get recognition.'

Picture perfect

The Bafta sponsorship is important to Orange, Evans continues, because it connects the public to Orange Wednesdays, the scheme where only Orange customers have access to 'two for one' cinema tickets anywhere in the UK. The aim of this offer was to differentiate Orange from its competitors and to create a sense that using Orange as a phone company gave customers something extra.

Evans points out that sponsoring an event like the Bafta awards is not about hanging onto the coat-tails of glamour and celebrity; the sponsorship also helps the British film industry. Ten years ago, Bafta was just an industry event, about which the general public knew very little. 'Our aim was to raise the profile of British film, as well as to show what Orange had to offer,' says Evans.

The strategy seems to have paid off. Last year the company commissioned an NOP poll and Orange was the number one brand associated with film.

'It allows us to differentiate ourselves from other brandings,' Evans adds. 'We don't just slap an Orange label on a prize and think, That's it, it's branded. We are very careful about what we sponsor because we look at how it connects to us and our customers.'

The process of choosing what sponsorship the company will support is done collectively. 'It's essentially a marketing decision, but all the directors of the company have a say in the matter,' Evans points out.

Similar strategies and thinking go on over at financial management company and hedge fund specialists Man. Lena Nichols, investor relations manager at the group, agrees that choosing to sponsor an award is very much about fitting the specific award to the profile of the company and its business.

Man decided to renew its sponsorship of the internationally recognised Booker Prize for Literature last year, when the Booker Prize Foundation was once again looking for a longterm sponsor. 'We believe our sponsorship brings the group increased profile globally, and supports our wider marketing activity both in the UK and internationally,' says Nichols. 'The Booker Prize is arguably the blue-chip event in the literary world, which aligns well with our own status as a constituent of the FTSE 100 index.'

Page-turners

The sponsorship deal is worth £1 mn a year and covers sponsorship of both the Man Booker Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Nichols says such high-end sponsorship has helped the company, and has particularly boosted Man's reputation as an international business. It has also allowed Man to grow, often in unexpected ways.

'When we first entered into the agreement, we didn't expect to extend the prizes to the Man International Award, but we have been closely involved in driving this particular development, as well as sponsoring a third prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, for literature from the Asian region.' Nichols points out that sponsorship also helps the writing community. The Man Booker prize is worth £50,000 to the winning writer, but the publicity provides an opportunity to contribute to a good cause, too: encouraging and supporting reading and writing. Man has started outreach programmes in libraries, funded the translation of the long-list of talking books for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), and provided over £1 mn in funding for the 'Every child a reader' scheme, an initiative to help children in inner-city schools.

Charity begins at the office Doing good in the community seems to be an important aspect of prize giving, and not all companies hook onto the glamorous side of prizes. For example, BP Marsh, the financial group, allows the Marsh Christian Trust to operate from its Sloane Square headquarters in London, entirely independently from the financial company.

Currently the trust offers 25 prizes a year, ranging from awards for sculpture, fountains and literature to the more eclectic prizes for conservation (marine and freshwater awards), and the Marsh Lepidoptera Awards, in association with the British Butterfly Society.

Brian Marsh, founder and chairman of the trust, says the charity is run completely separately from the company; both groups simply share him as chairman. 'It is a very personal operation - and far removed from the red carpet,' he points out.

Marsh, who started the Marsh Christian Trust in 1981 after his father died and left him £75,000, once even considered taking on sponsorship of the Man Booker Prize but turned it down because he felt he could be more useful elsewhere. His aim is to celebrate the unsung hero, and while he felt there were many charity and grant-making bodies about, he also felt many of them just didn't 'cut the mustard', so people don't get recognition. 'I believe in supporting ordinary individuals who work their butts off,' Marsh says. 'I am not really interested in celebrity parties.'

Even so, Marsh does not begrudge large corporations from using awards and prizes as a way of gaining brand recognition. Many do incredibly good work and embrace community obligations, he notes. 'But because I have no investors to answer to, other than myself, I am not beholden to anyone,' he points out. 'It's an entirely personal choice. I am just not into branding and marketing our work. I see the Marsh Christian trust as the human face of capitalism.'

Despite Orange sponsorship having to be approved by its investors at a managerial level rather than by one man, Evans agrees with Marsh on this issue and says the public is not fooled by lack of authenticity. 'Sponsorship of prizes is about showing the human side of your company, about making an emotional connection that means something to your customers and that even your investors can engage in,' she says. 'Ultimately, that is what marketing is about.'

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