Leveraging Experiential Sports Marketing for Brand Engagement

In today’s world, where everyone is trying to make their unique approaches to engaging with target audiences. Simple advertisements do not work anymore and a company cannot just rely on word of mouth, flyers, and printed material to promote their products. Therefore they are now resorting to other forms of marketing that can engage the consumer more fully, one of which is experiential sports marketing. This powerful tool helps brands strengthen their bonds with consumers, with the help of meaningful, fun, activity-based interactions with their own passion for sports.
The Rise of Experiential Sports Marketing
Experiential sports marketing is based on the concept of engaging consumers through sport-related activity. Whether the implementation of a game, live event, or interesting fan interaction, this creates the link between the emotional aspect of sports and brands solidifying bonds with the audience. This strategy is most suitable since people attach positive feelings such as joy, excitement, and pride to sports when branding a product that is associated with such feelings, which is likely to influence the buyer in a positive way. Well-executed, experiential sports marketing leads to increased brand salience, improved brand effect, and even improved customer retention.

Skoda’s Single Wicket Cricket Tournament
Skoda decided it was time that people of India associated Skoda with quality and one of the best ways to do this was through the association with the most popular sport in the country- Cricket. To establish the brand this event was created with the Skoda single Wicket. tournament a new form of cricket product specially designed for young crickets who are accompanied by their families. The tournament covered fifty cities within India itself and had participants who were enthusiasts hailing from more than 955 schools and thus made a successful attempt to build a nexus between the brand and the fervor for cricket in the country.
Solution:
Skoda developed a new format of cricket play special for a youth team. Such a concept enabled participants to explode the talent in a six-ball game that was played by two players on each side thus making the team’s success unpopular among the players. This concentration on specific abilities provided the participants themselves an equal ground that was beneficial for the more competent players who faced less competent ones and therefore provided a level playing field due to competitiveness.
Impact
The Skoda Single Wicket tournament connected the company with more than 60,000 understands from 955 schools, whilst 23,000 students signed up for the competition. It also led to a rise in Skoda dealership traffic and 23 On-Avg on-ground sales inquiries by city. The tournament explained to the world that experiential sports marketing is an important way of developing an emotional brand connection with consumers as well as ensuring that the firms achieve their sales and brand loyalty objectives.
Experiential Sports Marketing Beyond Cricket
Despite cricket ruling the roost in India other brands have gone a step further to explore other sports beyond cricket to market their brands to the target audiences.


Chupa Chups
Chupa Chups, a popular confectionery across the world, gained entry into the global league popularizing it by taking the help of experiential sports marketing to groups of youths. The brand of Chupa Chups embarked on the #ForeverFun campaigns that saw the development of the brand to incorporate simple and playful activities meant to capture the spirit of the Gen Z generation. Some of the cheerful practices included in the schools and colleges across India included Human Foosball, and Chupa Chups bite balancing among others.
Of tremendous educational value and applying quite an original concept, this campaign not only brought Chupa Chups to over 1. 5 lakh students apart from getting a spontaneous brand recall rate of 61% and product awareness of 92%. Using the pillars of entertainment sports and experiential marketing the brand left a memorable impression within the target group.


Hot Wheels
Contrary to Time Toys, Hot Wheels decided to use an educational scheme under the banner of ‘Play with Purpose’ with Hot Wheels play sets designed especially for young children. Using such concepts as speed, gravity, a trajectory, Hot Wheels associated its brand message with fun and learning. More than 9,000 children took part in the program, implemented in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi as a part of the interactive workshops and track-building activities.
The initiative was successful and redefined the brand from being perceived as being aggressive to being creative and learning. This example shows that education, life skills, and entertainment all combined with the core brand message create a long-lasting impression in the minds of the target group while at the same time marketing the product.
Conclusion
This form of marketing is unique and highly effective since it takes into consideration the experiences consumers want to have with the brands they use Experiential sports marketing is therefore a very useful tool in the modern world considering that consumers are looking to have endearing experiences with brands. From grand events like the Skoda Single Wicket tournament in India, toys like Chupa Chups’ #ForeverFun campaign, or something more informative like Hot Wheels Labs, the ways are endless through which brands can connect with sports.
Thereby, brands that are able to deliver a fully engaging experience, kindling an emotional interest of the sports enthusiasts, develop consumers’ loyalty and thus can generate significant business outcomes. As people keep on embracing sports as entertainment, experiential sports marketing will provide the industry with a way to reach out to their target market and place their brands in a positive light for increased recognition.