Sportspeople primed for Olympic brand success

Ruth Mortimer is Marketing Week’s associate editor and a prolific blogger. She won a PPA Award for her forthright and insightful columns on marketing.

It is already being debated which corporate brands will do best by their association with the  London 2012 Olympics next summer. But some of the brands most likely to see a boost at the Games are the indivdual sportsperson brands. With future endorsements worth millions of pounds, British athletes could make more than £2m if win gold medals.

Research from the Mail on Sunday looking into Team GB sponsorships since the 2008 Beijing Games has calculated the monetary awards on offer for successful sportspeople. With gold medal success next summer, each athlete could expect to land up to four major endorsements worth up to £150,000 annually – or more than £2m in the four-year cycle up to the Rio 2016 Games.

While it is only the high-profile names expected to receive such a boost in income, there is still potential for some of the Games’ unexpected winners to receive a branding boost for their career as well as a sporting victory.

And once you are on the list of individual sports brands, you can expect more brands to come your way. After all, even Tiger Woods, shamed over multiple affairs, has managed to remain the world’s most valuable sportsperson, according to Forbes. Recent deals with Japan’s Kowa Company, which deals in medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, have begun to build back up his list of endorsements. Woods recently dropped out of the list of the top 50 golfers but his commercial success remains obvious.

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If you are interested in sports marketing and have 10 minutes to spare, please help Marketing Week compile a feature on the topic by taking a survey here. The IFM Sports Marketing Surveys (IFM SMS) each year conducts a global industry survey with businesses involved in the world of sponsorship – you can see results in Marketing Week very soon.

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