Watch or listen to episode 315 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Paige Price, Social Media Creator for the Washington Spirit NWSL Club.
Paige discusses building her career in sports and content, her role with the Washington Spirit, getting to know the players and creating content with them, being the fans’ lens into the team, behind the scenes of the Trinity Rodman re-signing, and more.
Ostensibly, sports business is selling a product. A social experience, affordable family entertainment, a compelling show.
But products have customers. In sports, we want fans.
Fans make the team or league part of their personality. Their favorite sport or athlete becomes an inseparable part of their identity. They become evangelists for the brand, recruiting others and spreading the good word. That kind of devotion transcends the product; that’s where brand comes into play.
Paul Stafford has worked with the biggest consumer brands in the world, in sports, but also well beyond sports. He appreciates that brands are not just a name, a logo, or a tagline — that’s not how he’s helped organizations like Airbnb, EA, and the Premier League, among others, develop authentic, resonant brands. He gave me a thoughtful description of how to think about brand and the difference between building a brand and executing a business strategy.
“I think many businesses are good at distilling a business strategy and understanding what they’re trying to do on a tangible level of, of ‘We’re going to invest in this space, we’re going to develop this product, so we’re going to appeal to these target audiences,'” said Stafford, CEO of global branding and creative agency Further. “But actually, you can’t then just communicate that to the world, you need to understand, well, what does that mean, and how does that translate into a role that this business is going to play in their customers’ lives?
“What is it that Jeff Bezos famously said: A brand is what people say about you when they’re not in the room. And that’s exactly it. What are they going to say about you?”
These are the elements that broaden the impact of the product or service. And that’s why it’s integral for all parts of an organization to understand the brand and know how to put it into practice. Brand isn’t a marketing motion, it’s not a sales tactic, it’s not a guide for the roadmap, nor a tone or personality trait — it’s all those things and more. Stafford explained that the strongest brands hit fans with consistency and conviction at every level and interaction — that’s what makes it undeniable and recognizable.
“Every single interaction that any customer, any employee, anybody, any business has with your business should really kind of play through that lens of like, well, how does it build on that proposition, how is it uniquely a relationship and an experience that only our business could have?” said Stafford, who led the company DesignStudio before it coalesced into Further. “And I think that’s it. You should be able to cover the logo, cover the marketing copy, but the whole experience and interaction should feel very much like that brand. So it doesn’t really matter what the touchpoints are. They can grow and will continue to grow, especially in this world of AI, but actually, that proposition should stay sacred from the very beginning, right the way through to the very end.”
Something special starts to happen as the brand seeps in, when customers have something to latch onto and can transform from customers to fans. In sports, marketers can think of fandom on a spectrum — from curious casuals to diehard evangelists. More broadly for brands across any vertical, Stafford referenced the ‘commitment curve.’
The commitment curve can be tantamount to avidity, but it can also mean more than that nowadays. Because the best marketing is word of mouth, real people spreading the word organically, those at the top of the commitment curve aren’t just patrons, but promoters.
“If you think about this as a sort of chart, and you think about it as who’s the most committed on this side, and also then how much you can ask those people who are committed that much…,” said Stafford, who invoked the ‘commitment curve’ concept as originated by former Airbnb Global Head of Community, Douglas Atkin. “So if you think about it as a founder or a chairman or the team, it’s those people who are the most committed to the business, and you can make the biggest ask of them. You don’t need to sell them anything. They are the business.
“Then you can think about each of these parts of the community as like a step down. So the next step down will be your employees, the actual team’s players in there, you can almost ask them the same. Next down, you probably have your most avid fans and supporters. Next down, you’ve got ‘I go three, four times a year’ kind of fans. All the way through to people who have never heard of you.”
An underlying truth in all this is that brands can’t be dictated. If, as Stafford mentioned earlier (referencing Jeff Bezos), that brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, then surely brand cannot, by that definition, be centrally controlled. It’s in the hands of others, and the best that organizations can do is to influence the thoughts and ideas of the most vocal and influential.
It can be a sobering, even intimidating, realization that even with all the resources and distribution channels in the world, brands can only control so much. But flip that on its head, says Stafford, and empower others to tell your story. Make everyone who cares, who’s high on the commitment curve, stewards of the brand.
“I think when you’re generating a brand, what you need to think of is how do we give the assets to each of these people to make them take one step up that ladder?” said Stafford. “So what do we give our employees or our team? What tools do we give them so they start acting like founders, they start acting like CEOs, they know the decisions to make, they know how to communicate what this business means as a founder? Those superfans, how do we give them the tools they need to start talking about us like they play for the club?”
Stafford has seen the challenges and opportunities inherent in this framework when working with global, generational brands. They have to be resilient and preserved, but also adaptable and evolved. The key insight, Stafford explained, isn’t to concede to the staunch preservationists or follow the lead of those looking to the future — it’s about taking those fan evangelists on the journey with you. It’s a balancing act, said Stafford.
“If your club wants to move into all of these new spaces and forget its loyal fans, forget its roots, you lose that connection,” he told me. “And, like I’m saying, a brand is never successful by just its own internal teams communicating. You need those advocates. You need those fans to go and tell that story for you. So you need to take them on the journey. And that’s why, really, you have to understand what it is that’s important to them, how that becomes a foundation, and how it communicates where you’re going in the future.”
These principles came to bear when Stafford and his team were tasked with the Premier League rebrand in 2016-17, when the top global football league dropped the longtime ‘Barclays Premier League’ moniker and refreshed its logo, among other efforts. Stafford walked me through a bit of the process, describing the balance of respecting the past while looking ahead to the future. There were several elements for which to account.
“They went and interviewed the fans and listened to everything they said, and then created something that is exactly what the fans said,” explaining fans’ resistance to proposed changes. “But then, when they had it played back to them, it was wrong. I think that’s right.
“You gotta understand where you listen, where you challenge, and where you have to take fans on a journey to the future, even if they don’t like it at the beginning. So how are you going to take them on the journey?”
Bringing fans along for the ride necessarily requires loosening the reins of control. The platforms are too dynamic, and almost everybody wants to be something of a creator. It’s not just naive to think every fan who plays off your brand or remixes your content will adhere to some arcane, static standards, it’s short-sighted.
Stafford recognizes it’s not easy for brands to adapt to this new normal. But it’s an opportunity to achieve outsized results, to empower abassadors who will build on your brand and make it stronger, engendering greater loyalty, expansion, and engagement.
“We’re working a lot with brands now to say, well, we need to stop this being so locked down, we need to give it the flexibility to embrace and utilize the community, that they’re going to go and use these assets,” he said. “We just need to build some way that those things, whether that’s a visual way, whether it’s a tonal way, that kind of resonates and builds it back to us…
“So we are working with brands now [on] how do you create assets that can always be adapted, given out, iterated on, but also be recognized as you and yours and build that brand loyalty back to you. It’s going to be a bigger and bigger challenge as we go forward, but it is how brands need to start thinking.”
The most powerful brands, the ones that inspire zealous devotion, aren’t owned, but shared. That’s when customers act more like fans and fans behave more like evangelists. When fans don’t refer to the team as ‘them’ but ‘us’ — it’s our team, our organization, our brand. The commitment curve crests at the point where brand blends with identity, and fans feel part of it themselves.
Watch or listen to episode 314 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Paul Stafford, CEO of Further, a global branding and creative agency.
Paul discusses his work building DesignStudio before its expansion and reformation into Further, rebranding Airbnb and the Premier League, what goes into brand building, what the ‘commitment curve’ means in developing customers and fans, and more.
Why is sports sponsorship valuable? What factors make it a premium asset for brands?
Sure, the ability to command large, broad, often live audiences plays a major role. But as marketing has matured, the unique value proposition for sports has only grown and has become better understood and appreciated.
Sara Toussaint has seen this play out throughout her career, with experience on all sides of the sports and athlete sponsorship complex. She’s seen fan affinities drive business outcomes through partnerships, she’s been part of tactics that activated partnerships during emotionally charged moments in live sports, and she’s seen new, once vastly undervalued opportunities emerge in women’s sports, which perhaps coalesce all of the above factors in driving the premium value of sports sponsorship.
Toussaint, who today is co-CEO of global women’s soccer-focused athlete management agency TMJ, spent nearly a decade at Wells Fargo driving the bank’s sports sponsorships. Partnerships in sports were not on an island; they were part of Wells Fargo’s overall marketing plans and expected to drive tangible, compounding cross-channel results. Standard wisdom suggests sports fans will support the partners of their favorite teams, especially when it enhances their own fandom. Toussaint explained how this played out for Wells Fargo’s sponsorships in pro and college sports.
“On the Wells Fargo side, it was how do we support the marketing initiatives that the CMO had set in place?” said Toussaint, who spent time at Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer, among other stops, before her tenure at Wells Fargo. “We would use sponsorship as a way to augment the existing media plans and marketing strategies for everything from the websites and store, etc.
“Then, from the brand side, what the property really wanted [was for] Wells Fargo, especially around the Mexican national team and Major League Soccer, to promote those properties here in the US. So to have the Mexican national team debit card on every Wells Fargo ATM was a huge win…there’s a lot of data out there on consumer affinity to brands that support their favorite teams — and we definitely saw that in terms of the number of accounts that were opened, and we could tie that to a Mexican national team card, a Florida Gator card to a new account. Like, we could say on that account that was the card that they requested, and we can presume that we had done marketing there that had caused that demand.”
It’s not just about brand associations and tailing affinities, though. Part of the magic of sports sponsorships is the inherent preponderance of high-impact moments and campaigns. Times when fans are excited, their hearts racing, and their attention focused. That feature of sport is an opportunity for brand partners to make their sponsorships active, riding the wake of the emotional highs, augmented by the real-time nature and inherent connection of sports and social media.
Toussaint had a hand and a front-row view of these opportunities, with Wells Fargo’s partner, the national soccer team for Mexico, competing in the World Cup. She described a clever, provocative campaign that saw American soccer hero Landon Donovan expressing that he’d be cheering for Mexico, and also recounted how Wells Fargo made the most of their sponsorship during the matches and moments themselves.
“We did a lot of live social moments [during the World Cup],” she said. “Our social media team at Wells Fargo had a control room, and there were probably nine screens they could monitor, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook. We had the World Cup up while Mexico played, and we pre-programmed creative and copy as much as possible, so as things happened during a match, we were ready with a post, or we were ready to then supplement, like they just won, ‘Get your Wells Fargo Mexico debit card’ or whatever, and do that in real time. So that social media piece was a really big win for us around the World Cup.”
Social media wasn’t just a way for a brand like Wells Fargo to enter the conversation alongside the properties they were sponsoring, it also gave emerging sports, leagues, and athletes a more level, meritocratic playing field to fuel their rise. These catalyzing elements helped several new sports and leagues find footing, but the impact has been (and continues to be) most evident in women’s sports.
Toussaint recounted to me how a past colleague, at the time, saw the opportunity in women’s sports as a growing and undervalued asset. She looked at the rising National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), and it was the social and digital channels, in particular, which stood out.
“There were so many compelling reasons for sponsoring NWSL,” said Toussaint, who is also a co-owner of two pro soccer teams, the North Carolina Courage in the NWSL and Querétaro FC in Liga MX (Mexico’s top-flight men’s pro soccer league). “For me, the number one reason was the digital footprint and engagement footprint. I was like, Wow, this could be a really cost-effective way to get social media engagement.”
With more women’s sports and athletes commanding attention and audiences on social and digital media, the legacy media began catching up, with coverage going from 4% not long ago to around 15% today, Toussaint noted (citing reports from Sports Innovation Lab, among others). While the early sponsors have been followed by more brands, but the scope and scale of women’s sports still pales in comparison to most of the more mature, generations-old men’s sports properties and its traditional sponsorship assets.
That’s an opportunity, though, said Toussaint.
“With the women, aside from the data, we can also say, Look, it’s not as saturated as men’s sports, so you’re going to have a lot more awareness,” said Toussaint, who heads TMJ’s TMJ Catalyst, which focuses on connecting TMJ’s athletes with brands and business leaders for deals. “You have a lot more white space to play in. We talked about brand loyalty, you’re going to have a lot more of that. You’ve got new categories you can play with. You can try new things, and it becomes even more of a white space because you’re not competing against brands that are typically in this landscape. So that’s a big piece.”
The combination of more media coverage, more brand partnerships, bigger audiences, and more fan interest has turned women’s sports into an asset class that’s increasingly attracting institutional capital and high-net-worth individuals. That infusion and energy will only accelerate the flywheel, driving more growth and more capital in a virtuous cycle of value creation. The bigger fan bases, superstar athletes, and increased cross-channel footprint are all good signs for the continued rise of women’s sports — but it’s that investment that Toussaint cited as perhaps the most impactful factor showing the world, especially the business world, that women’s sports are far from the more charity-driven, corporate social responsibility play the properties may have been a generation ago.
“People follow wherever the money goes, and you’re seeing big money get into women’s sports, and you’re seeing billionaires buying [in],” she said. “And for whatever reason, people think billionaires are like the smartest folks in the room…That news is now on CNBC, and marketers are watching CNBC, right? So you’ve got exponential input that’s coming into the space, and that’s really important. Where the money goes, especially big money names, you’re going to have the media following, and you’re going to have the marketers follow, too.”
The marketers are here. The value proposition for women’s sports is undeniable. And the new paradigms in sports business will favor women’s sports, with its strong social and digital game. As sponsorship further appreciates elements beyond eyeballs, it’ll be the sports properties that can deliver activation and affinities, and the brands that can capitalize on sports’ special elements and emotions that will turn potential value into kinetic outcomes.
