Co-branding for the Win: Businesses invest with sports teams

Two local companies bet their advertising dollars on co-branding with Springfield sports teams – and it’s paying off.

Jersey Mike’s Subs’ and Old Missouri Bank’s partnerships with the Springfield Cardinals and Missouri State University Bears, respectively, are pushing the businesses’ goals of differentiating themselves in a market that’s known to be full of eateries and overbanked.

Craig Rankin opened his first Jersey Mike’s franchise off Glenstone Avenue and Sunshine Street in August 2014.

“We had a limited marketing budget and were unknown in the community. The Cardinals are very well known,” said Rankin. “We wanted to spend our marketing dollars aligning with someone who could hopefully increase our profile, and the Cardinals have done exactly that.”

ROI
Rankin said 50 percent of his marketing and advertising budget goes toward signage and promotions with the Springfield Cardinals in Hammons Field. Combined with other partnerships with sports teams, including MSU Athletics and local soccer leagues, nearly 90 percent of Jersey Mike’s total ad dollars are dedicated to sports.

Dan Reiter, vice president and general manager of the Springfield Cardinals, said sports advertising provides a captive audience.

“What they’ve realized, and why stadium signage is so important, is that we live in a fast-paced world,” he said. “We have hundreds of thousands of people coming through Hammons Field each year, and when they’re here they are relaxed. You can’t fast-forward a sign. You can’t change the channel on it.”

While Rankin said it’s hard to break down the forms of advertising driving growth in sales, he attributes much of it to his relationships with local sports teams. At the Glenstone restaurant, sales rose 22 percent from 2017-18, and at the East Battlefield Road store, which opened in April 2017, sales were up 20 percent in the same time frame. Now, Rankin is eyeing a third location.

“Aligning ourselves with sports has been good for our business,” Rankin said.

At Old Missouri Bank, Senior Vice President of Marketing Shanda Trautman said the bank’s investment in MSU Athletics comes in at 11 percent of marketing and advertising dollars. Aside from television advertising, that’s the largest spend in one space for the bank, and she said by next year, it likely will become the largest at 16 percent.

Partnering with the Bears was strategic, Trautman said, in rebranding the bank’s image and reaching its new target demographic.

“When I started a little over three years ago, we were really an ag bank, and we weren’t really a retail bank,” she said. “We weren’t known really in our industry other than farmers.

“We’ve been very intentional on having a target audience – and that’s millennials – and we have the transfer of wealth going on, so we’ve got to grab that audience.”

She said the number of account holders in the millennial age group jumped 115 percent over the course of 2018. According to past Springfield Business Journal reporting, the bank’s local deposits increased 15.9 percent to $339 million in 2018.

“We have a multifaceted marketing plan, but our partnership with Missouri State plays a big role in what we do and the outcomes and the growth that we see,” Trautman said.

Win-win
Co-branding is paying off for the sports teams, too.

MSU Athletics Director Kyle Moats said since he joined the university in 2009, corporate sponsorships have risen 144 percent to $512,000 annually in 2019 from $210,000 a decade ago.

A year after he came on board, he said the university began a partnership with its media rights holder, Learfield Communications LLC, which sells corporate sponsorships on behalf of the athletics department.

“They’re not all the same packages. They’re not all the same levels of commitment,” Moats said of corporate sponsorships. “It just depends on what that particular partner or sponsor, what they can do, and we try to tailor that based on the inventory.”

Trautman said she was sold on the partnership when statistics presented by Learfield showed the impact of brands on sports fans. She said the data showed 78 percent of fans would consider switching brands or changing buying habits based on the sponsors they see at games and 75 percent of fans are proud to associate themselves with companies that back athletic teams.

At JQH Arena, Old Missouri Bank has branding rights of the ticket booth year-round, Trautman said, and officials created an event with MSU and the Springfield Police Department dubbed Share the Bear. The bank encourages fans to donate teddy bears for officers to give to kids in crisis situations. This year, the event was held at the Jan. 23 men’s basketball game and collected 800 bears – 300 more than 2018’s inaugural event.

“It was a great promotion and gets people out to the games,” Moats said.

The Bears basketball teams’ winning seasons also are bringing in more fans. Season tickets for men’s games is up 5.3 percent over last year to 2,186 tickets, he said. Sponsors have taken notice.

“People are in tune. They want to know about the Bears and they want to be part of the Bears,” Trautman said. “When you have a winning team and just a great organization – and that doesn’t just go for Coach [Dana] Ford, it’s Kellie Harper too – you gain traction. The more eyes we have and the more people in the seats, the better our spend and investment.”

For the 2018-19 season, the men’s basketball team, led by new head coach Ford, is 16-14 and women’s basketball is 17-8 as of press time.

At the Cardinals Double A games, overall attendance was down 5,000 fans for the 2018 season, Reiter said, due to two extra rainout games as compared with 2017, but average game-day attendance inched up 1.5 percent to 4,871 fans.

He said corporate sales are handled in-house with a team of a half-dozen staffers. But at the minor leagues, he said, everyone helps secure support, even down to the groundskeeper.

At Rankin’s restaurants, he touts his company’s support of the Springfield Cardinals with a life-size cutout of mascot Louie and other game and team memorabilia.

At the field, Jersey Mike’s has sponsored fireworks nights and has a standing sign in left field. The restaurant offers buy one, get one promotions on the backs of tickets, as well as will call and season ticket envelopes, which has a redemption rate of 10-15 percent.

“It’s really a high redemption rate for the back of the ticket and the back of an envelope,” he said. “We are confident that our focus on athletics has been beneficial.”