Most sponsorships fail because brands use sport to borrow relevance instead of building their own. The best partnerships start with a clear brand story and use sport to amplify it, not replace it. A logo on a shirt can't fix a weak brand strategy, believes Brand and Marketing Director, Martin Dyhouse.

Your brand has nothing to say. That's why you bought the shirt.

We're all guilty of it. We sign deals we’re proud of, write the press releases, shoot the campaign assets and call it brand building. Most sports sponsorships are an expensive way of avoiding the hard question.

When someone thinks about our brand, what do we want them to think?

Brands don’t choose a sports property because the audience is right. They choose it because it makes them feel more interesting than they actually are.

The team provides the drama. The fans provide the emotional roller coaster. The never-ending drumbeat of the sporting calendar provides the cultural relevance.

Most brands can’t generate these things themselves, so they stand next to rights holders and hope something transfers.

Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. And a logo on a shirt is not enough.

You need to build a partnership you can both use to tell stories worth telling.

The sporting world is in constant motion. Every day is a new news cycle. Each event is a meaningful moment. Cultural conversations happen every week. Having your brand embedded in that gives you ongoing relevance that paid media simply cannot manufacture. But only if you have something real to say.

 Most brands forget that twelve months earlier, another brand was in the same spot on that shirt. The fans watched it. Ignored it. And moved on. They’ve seen it all before, and they’ll see it again.

Your brand is a tiny part of their lives. The sport is everything. How do you become a sponsor that they would actually miss?

I've signed deals I'm proud of and deals I'd do differently. The ones that worked had three things in common.

First, the positioning existed before the conversation with any rights holders started. We clearly aligned internally on what we wanted to achieve, how we wanted to be perceived and the brand associations we wanted to strengthen before we began any process. The brief to the rights holder was specific because we had clarity first.

 Second, they focused on a small, highly relevant part of the fan base. Not the entire stadium. Every activation was built for them. Did this upset the wider fan base? At times, but it meant high levels of engagement with those who mattered.

Third, they used the partnership to create specific content that could only exist because of the companies involved. We told the stories of people in the community to celebrate local heroes. We used current players and well-known fans to achieve campaign cut through. We worked with club legends to showcase our value and products in ways no media buy could replicate. The club's IP became part of the brand story. Not a badge on top of it.

 The deals that didn't work had one thing in common. The property came first. It was the late evening call about distressed inventory that was too good to be true. It was the email that began that, compared to TV, this is the deal of the century. It was the last-minute pitch call telling me that we’ll get two years for the price of one, but we need the letter of intent today, and you need to pay fifty per cent in crypto to an offshore account. 

 In every case, the brand thinking always came after. And no amount of content, activation, or community engagement closed that gap. There was never enough time to do it properly.

 Most sponsorship value compounds over time. But only if there's something underneath worth compounding.

 When the contract ends, what do you actually own? If the feeling only existed because of the property, the answer is nothing. You rented equity and emotions you never built.

 My rule is simple. If your sponsorship could be replaced by a media buy and nobody would notice, you shouldn’t be doing it.

 You don't have a sponsorship problem. You have a brand problem. And no logo on a shirt is going to fix it.