Sony-FIFA Partnership Marketing Program: The Value of Sponsorship

On April 6, 2005, Sony Corporation announced the signing of a global partnership program contract with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the organizer of the FIFA World Cup. The contract, which represented the first global marketing and communications platform for the Sony Group, would run from 2007 to 2014 with a contract value (excluding services and product leases) of ¥33.0 billion (approximately $305 million). This was a very significant marketing investment for Sony, since the cost of event sponsorship with advertising was typically two or three times the cost of the sponsorship rights: Hence, Sony was potentially investing a billion dollars or more on FIFA related marketing campaigns over the next several years. Many Sony senior executives were questioning the return on investment (ROI) of the FIFA sponsorship opportunity. The case tasks students with designing a creative marketing campaign to "Activate the FIFA sponsorship opportunity and maximize ROI beyond conventional sponsorship marketing." This open ended challenge encourages students and executives to be creative, and is the same task that faced Sony executives. Beyond designing a new marketing campaign, a key objective of the case is to focus students on designing metrics for measurement into a campaign plan. As a first step, it is important to clearly articulate the campaign and business strategy, and key business objectives mapped to the strategy. Students create a balanced score card for the campaign they create. This score card should include both financial and non-financial metrics to quantify value.