Sponsorship, influencers, reputation: 5 interesting stats to start your week

We arm you with all the numbers you need to tackle the week ahead.

Gambling brands ousted as top sports sponsors

A demand for sports teams to be more socially responsible has seen a shift away from gambling industry sponsors.

Gambling was the top sponsorship sector two years ago, but the sector has seen its share across all sports sponsorships almost halve from 15.3% to 8.1%. The drop has been driven by football, where gambling sponsors have reduced from 32.7% of the total to 15.2%, with 17 gambling brands ceasing to be sponsors.

Across professional football, rugby and cricket teams sponsors from the construction/engineering, automotive and financial services sectors all now outnumber gambling brands. However, if football is taken alone gambling remains the top sector, while financial services is dominant in rugby, and automotive and construction lead the way in cricket.

Construction and engineering brands accounted for 11.2% of total sponsors in the study, automotive for 9.4% and financial 8.5%. Gambling accounted for 8.1%.

The increased digitisation of commerce has seen IT services/software become the fast-growing sponsor sector, with eight new sponsors entering the market. Six of these are among women’s teams, where there has been a 600% rise in IT sponsors.

Source: Caytoo

Marketer CEOs beat finance CEOs on overall reputation

CEOs with a marketing background have a better overall reputation than business leaders from nearly all other areas, including those with a background in finance, engineering and economics, according to new research.

Marketing CEOs have an overall reputation score of 8.32, according to data from Brand Finance’s Top 100 Brand Guardians Index. This puts marketer CEOs ahead of those with a background in finance (8.21), engineering (8.19), computer science (7.89) and economics (7.80).

When it comes to overall reputation, marketer CEOs come second only to those with a background in law, who have a score of 8.58.

Compared to CEOs from other backgrounds, former marketers score particularly well on being socially responsible and promoting diversity and inclusion (both 42%).

This compares to CEOs with a background in law, where just 36% of former lawyers understand the importance of being socially responsible, as well as finance (39%), engineering (38%), economics (33%) and computer science (30%). The global average for CEOs on promoting diversity and inclusion, meanwhile, is 34%.

Marketer CEOs also score highly by comparison when it comes to implementing a strong strategy and long-term vision (44%). Only finance CEOs score higher at 45%.

Likewise former marketers come near the top when it comes to understanding the importance of brand and reputation for the organisation (44%), just behind finance CEOs on 46% and economics CEOs on 45%.

Source: Brand Finance

Personalisation gap rises between consumer expectations and retailers’ capabilities

There is a growing gap between consumers’ expectations when it comes to personalisation and what retailers are delivering.

More than two-thirds of consumers (70%) say branded communications from retailers tends to feel relatively generic, while 49% suggest impersonal interactions such as this will reduce their likelihood to buy.

This is partly because 51% say they have started to receive more impersonal or irrelevant marketing communications over the past 12 months.

Retailers, meanwhile, suggest personalisation is critical to their current operations (66%), with 71% expecting it to become more important over the next five years.

The problem it seems is that 40% of retailers say that can only identify between 26%-50% of shoppers, while an additional 23% say they can only identify a quarter of people visiting their site.

Source: Wunderkind

Grocery sales hold steady as UK lockdown eases

With a drop of just 2.4%, total till grocery sales for the four weeks to 19 June have remained largely unchanged, while growth over the last 12 weeks is flat.

Despite the lack of growth the data reflects a “strong performance” for grocery sales, indicating supermarkets are holding sales levels well as lockdown restrictions ease.

Online grocery sales saw a more significant decline, falling by 6.9% over the four week period. However, 8 million shoppers (or 28% of all households) continue to shop online every four weeks, suggesting online shopping will remain at a much higher level than pre-pandemic. Online share of FMCG sales is currently 13.1%.

Of the ‘big four’ supermarkets, Sainsbury’s was the only one to grow market share in the last 12 weeks. Sales at Lidl soared by 20.4%, driven by new store openings, while M&S increased its food sales by 11.3%.

Sales for Co-op and Iceland remain in decline compared to pandemic levels, although the increase in visits to these retailers continues to mirror the market.

Source: NielsenIQ

Instagram’s top 10 highest earners per post

Cristiano Ronaldo has topped the 2021 Instagram Rich List as the platform’s highest earning star, commanding $1.6m per post. With 309 million followers, the Portuguese footballer also has the highest number of fans on the platform.

The estimated cost of his posts has increased by 54% since 2020, moving him from third to first in the ranking.

Second on the 2021 list is actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson who has 251 million followers and earns an average of $1.5m per post, while singer Ariana Grande commands slightly less on average at $1,510,000 per post.

The rest of the top 10 is made up of Kylie Jenner ($1.5m), Selena Gomez ($1.5m), Kim Kardashian ($1.4m), Lionel Messi ($1.2m), Beyoncé ($1.1m), Justin Bieber ($1.1m) and Kendal Jenner ($1.1m).

Source: Hopper HQ

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