by Stuart Wareman – ESA Board Director and Director of Partnerships & Strategic Alliances, Europe, for Marriott International
Brands receive proposals from rights holders constantly and most never see it past the first inbox. How do rights holders cut through and be more efficient in their new business approach?
It’s all about changing the conversation and becoming business and marketing consultants, offering solutions to brands. Here are my top tips to rights holders, in pitching their properties to brands.
1. Do your homework
If you know nothing about my business, my industry sector or my brand, how can you expect to provide me with a compelling business or marketing proposition?
There’s so much industry and brand information freely available that it’s not difficult to understand the company, its industry sector, key trends and challenges, as well as what the business model is. I constantly get asked for free hotel rooms in return for sponsorship rights, oblivious to the fact that we don’t own our hotels and therefore we cannot offer free rooms.
A good PR will not cold call a journalist or influencer to sell in a story without first reading their previous features and posts and recognising how their story can work for that journalist or influencer. It should be same for rights holders approaching brands for sponsorship. Understand how we go to market, know our audiences and our customer journey, how our marketing activities are funded and what our strategy is that differentiates us from our competitors. And reflect this in your approach to us by showing how you can help us.
2. Can you solve a problem for us?
The old rights holder approach was to provide rigid ‘off the shelf’ rights packages to brands. This evolved into unbundling all rights and assets and telling brands all the various possibilities available, in an effort to be seen as having a ‘tailored’ approach. Whilst this is a noble sentiment in understanding the need for flexibility, the actual approach is problematic for brands. Even if a brand has specialist sponsorship resource, being presented with a vast array of rights possibilities is overwhelming and gives the brand the problem of wading through it all to put the jigsaw together to make it work. Most simply don’t have the time.
Rights holders need to understand what the brand’s challenges are and tailor a commercial and marketing solution using the available rights to provide a solution. And, if rights holders have helped other brands with similar challenges, then provide the case study to prove it.
3. How much will it cost?
Framing the indicative cost is vital up front. I appreciate that the whole unbundling of rights and assets makes this a challenge for rights holders, but it’s the first question I ever got asked by clients when I was agency side and it’s still the first question I get asked internally, brand side. Even if it’s a range. And don’t provide overly inflated valuations and costs, expecting negotiations to bring it down to reasonable levels. Brands will just dismiss it as unrealistic at the start and the rights holder will lose all credibility.
Do have an understanding of our likely budget levels based on the brand’s media spend. Know our sources of funding and therefore what’s realistic for the brand to consider.
4. What’s your track record?
Rights holders should be proud of their work helping their other partners. Show how other brands have worked with you to grow their brands and businesses. Rights holders often approach me claiming they can bring their customers to our hotels, yet still want me to pay a high rights fee, as well as provide a compelling offer to incentivise their customers to book with us. This is asking me to buy the business twice and take all the risk in the relationship. If you’re that confident you can drive incremental business for me, either give me guaranteed revenue or structure the rights fees on a performance (CPA) basis.
5. Why us?
No brand wants to know that they’re just one of many that rights holders are interested in working with. Brands understand you will be speaking with others, but we want to know why our brand is the one you want to work with. Let me know what you are looking to achieve as a result of a partnership with us and how our brand, above all others, can help deliver your objectives.
Find out more about Stuart and the ESA Leadership team.
