‘bluQube v. bluQube’

Sometimes the association between sport and sponsorship is not obvious, but with a bit of lateral thinking and good activation, sponsorship can provide some great content for promotion that really differentiates you from the competition.

Take bluQube, the accounting software package that has been a long time supporter of UK sailor Katie Miller. Of course the boat gets coverage while racing, but between races, it is also a great asset to utilise. The company is activating the sponsorship in a new series of videos that challenge the sportswoman to beat the accounting software in 3 challenges.

The videos were filmed in the Solent and show that you don’t need expensive production budgets to get across your message. The objective of the challenges was to demonstrate whether Katie can finish a number of sailing tasks faster than it takes the bluQube user to complete a range of key accounting procedures such as sending out invoices, creating monthly payment runs or distributing financial reports.

bluQube’s Marketing Manager, Mat Kirby, explains the thinking behind the campaign:

“We wanted potential customers to understand both the simplicity and powerful capabilities of bluQube accounting software and felt that this would be a novel yet exciting approach to promote the benefits to our target audience. We have a long tradition of sailing sponsorship, a sport particularly popular amongst financial directors, so the concept of using some fun challenges that showcase both our bluQube sailing boat and our software at the same time was a perfect fit. The fact that the bluQube user was able to complete the accounting tasks via a laptop whilst aboard a moving boat, was also crucial in showing how flexible the browser-based software is.”

The three challenges include:-

Challenge # 1: Katie has to remove sail cover, attached head of sail to mast and hoist mainsail weighing 40kgs while bluQube user, Rob has to create 62 invoices and email same invoices to recipients

Challenge # 2: Katie has to Sail 3.5 nautical mile trip in the Solent while bluQube user, Rob has to enter Month end journals, Generate debt letters, Create Monthly payment Run

Challenge # 3: Katie has to Sail 5 nautical mile trip in the Solent while bluQube user, Rob has to produce monthly, quarterly and YTD performance, Cash & Debtors Position, Income Breakdown, Plan v. Actual and email to the board.

More Sailing Sponsorship activation News..

Sailing could make more of the ‘Brand Ambassador’ concept. For the most part, sailors are well educated, can speak to media and represent a brand in a way that delivers real value. And it’s not just Olympic stars like Ben Ainslie or legends like Paul Cayard that can be matched with brands. UK sailor Hannah White has announced on her website that she will become a brand ambassador for Wight Vodka with a title that plays on the positioning and heritage of the product.

White says:

“How cool is to be Wight Vodka’s Brand Czar for the next year? Very cool. Let’s face the facts! When Ritu and I worked together last year on the OSTAR, I knew we were onto something special. Wight Vodka has such a fabulous focus on the yachting lifestyle that I love so much, that the White and Wight partnership was destined to mature. This is just one more step in a long partnership together!”

The role will make Hannah the face of the brand in several activation campaigns throughout the year.

I’ll be marketing and promoting the Wight Vodka brand everywhere I travel. If you’re a bar or yacht club on the Atlantic or Pacific coast that I’ll be visiting over the coming year, you better have Wight Vodka on the top shelf! I’m also launching a news service to the yachting fraternity through a series of Podcasts over the coming 12 months, with a deeper insight into the sailor’s competitive and somewhat hectic lifestyle than previously seen. We’re calling these Vodcasts in recognition of Wight Vodka’s support. I’ll also be carrying the Wight Vodka branding on the boat and our kit.

Ritu Manocha, owner of 50 North, the company behind Wight Vodka says:

“This is a significant step forward for the White and Wight brand alliance. We knew from working with Hannah on her fabulous trans-Atlantic success in the 2009 OSTAR that we wanted to continue with our relationship. ‘White and Wight’ is such an obviously superb pairing. The hardest part of this relationship was figuring out what to call Hannah: Brand Ambassador? Emissary? Brand Agent (or Secret Agent)? Special Envoy? We went for Brand Czar because it sounded right with just a little edge to it!”

More Sailing Sponsorship News…

A while back, we interviewed Simon Kearsley; CEO at Accounting Software Vendor bluQube. Simon has written a piece for business website Fresh Business Thinking outlining again why he uses sailing as a platform for achieveing his marketing goals.

Here are some excerpts from the article…

In the beginning, we looked at a range of different sports sponsorship but finally eliminated these in favour of sailing. We felt that this sport uniquely had the right attributes to complement our own company identity and product branding and were convinced that many of our target audience such as CFOs, Finance Directors and other senior managers would share an affinity with sailing.

Many often feel that sponsorship is a bit of a luxury and is one of the first things to go when marketing budgets are squeezed. For bluQube though it has been a completely different story, one that many other organisations could learn from.

Like many companies we operate in a highly competitive marketplace often against rivals that sell similar solutions but may have far larger marketing budgets. Like other forms of PR, sponsorship can help level the playing field as well as promote you as different from the rest of the pack.

As a result of sponsorship bluQube has gone from an unknown brand to becoming a key player in the accounting software world. But how has this happened? The mistake that many organisations make regarding sponsorship is that they sign a deal, part with the funding, then sit back and wait for something to happen. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that and the size of the return will be proportional to the effort and conviction you put into the project.

What Dreams are made of

The advantage of sailing sponsorship is that it gives you the opportunity to present an on-going human interest commentary often tied into events within the sailing calendar. Amongst other races such as the FastNet, the OSTAR was Katie’s biggest challenge and attracted the most interest, not only from the media but also amongst our existing customers and prospects. What was even better though was that Katie, aged 22, also managed to set a record for being the youngest ever female competitor to finish the race. This is the kind of press you can only dream of and translated into pages of coverage in national (The Sunday Times), business (Management Today) and lifestyle (Womens Fitness) press. In parallel we ran a series of communications with existing and potential customers which kept them updated with Katie’s progress. We even created our own bluQube blog which was hugely popular.

Get the balance right

My advice to others contemplating sponsorship is that you need to consider how it fits into your overall plan.
If it’s just stuck out on a limb and has no part in all your other marketing messages and campaigns then you could waste a big part of your investment because not enough people know about your sponsorship and it may jar with the rest of your branding.

500% return

From our own experience I can confidently say that the return so far from our investment has been as much as 500%, which is staggering when you look at typical ROI from other types of marketing expenditure such as advertising.

What can sailing sponsorship deliver

• Unique hospitality and networking events for existing and prospective customers (e.g. Sailing days etc.)
• Beating the gatekeeper – information on sailing can break down the usual barriers of getting in front of decision makers
• Differentiation, credibility and the ability to compete against larger competitors in the marketplace
• Motivation for own staff and understanding/reinforcement of key brand values
• On-going market research
• Lead generation through PR linked to sponsorship
• Visibility of your brand on a national & global stage e.g. bluQube has had branding within the last 12 months in Vendee Globe, Cowes Week, London & Southampton boat shows, FastNet race & The Silicon Cup
• Empathy with target audience due to own interest in sailing giving opportunity to reach prospects in a ‘soft’ way
• Full boat branding & opportunity for merchandising e.g. clothing, mugs etc.

www.bluQube.co.uk

Katie Miller has added more sponsors to her OSTAR campaign. In addition to title sponsor bluQube, Katie will be supported by new associte sponsor Elite Automotive Systems, a Tamworth based supplier of heating and air-conditioning systems.

Having won the prestigious Raymarine “Young Sailor of the Year” award in 2006 following a round Britain voyage to raise £10,000 for the Ellen MacArthur Trust, Katie is one of the rising stars of UK offshore racing.

Elite joins Southampton Solent University as an Associate Sponsor.

Read why BluQube sponsored Katie for her OSTAR campaign.

Some good sponsorship news from the UK. OSTAR competitor Oscar Mead has announced that  ‘King of Shaves’ will be the primary sponsor of  Team Oscar Mead. Oscar, 18, has been enlisted in the King of Shaves Young Blades programme, and King of Shaves & Azor logos will be displayed on the mainsail of his J-105 yacht.

Oscar is one of the UK’s top up and coming solo and shorthanded sailors,and is officially confirmed as the youngest entrant in the 2009 OSTAR Oscar has a long term goal to be a race winning contender on the start line of the race all singlehanders want to compete in, the Vendee Globe round the World Race – Oscar’s target is 2016! Will King, Founder & CEO of The King of Shaves Company Ltd. comments:

“Sailing transformed my life as a teenager, and I learned many important life and management skills whilst teaching sailing at the NSC in Cowes in the mid 1980′s. King of Shaves has had a long history of association with sailing on the Isle of Wight – ‘The Small Island’, and having sponsored Cowes Dinghy Week between 1998-2000 & 2005-8, as well as being a Platinum Partner in the Gipsy Moth IV project run by David Green, the then CEO of the UKSA, we’re delighted to be able to put some wind in Oscar’s sponsorship sails, and wish him well in the forthcoming OSTAR”.

Oscar’s blog gives a little insight into how he managed to do the deal.

A few months ago I wrote an email to a guy called Will King who runs a company making razors and mens grooming products….

I had known of the brand for a few years as King Of Shaves sponsored Cowes Dinghy Week a few years ago and I sailed in the regatta in my 49er, anyway, to cut a long story short Will answered my email personally the next day, put me in touch with his “people” (just like in the movies but “Team” Oscar Mead is me (and my Dad!!) so people on my side were limited to 2! ) and within a few weeks we had a deal and my little boat now has King of Shaves logos on the bow and a MASSIVE “AZOR” logo on the mainsail.

If you ask 10 companies that sponsor sailing why they do it, you should get 10 different answers. This is because sponsorship is not like a magazine ad or a 30 second tv slot – one size does not fit all. Just as the sport of sailing is incredibly varied, so too are the companies that use the sport as a promotional platform. David Fuller had a chat with Simon Kearsley, CEO of financial software company bluQube who have supported Vendee Globe competitor Steve White and who have just announced a deal with up-and-coming solo sailor Katie Miller.

Q. Why has BluQube chosen sailing as a mechanism to promote the company & brand?

There was an element of it choosing us! We were approached by the now defunct Global Challenge organisation.

However, we were in a “receptive” state of mind at the time. We knew that we had to work on brand awareness and had been struggling to find a cost effective way of doing that for a B2B business. Advertising was very expensive and seemed to have variable results and sponsorship offered a more cost effective way forward.

I would be lying if I didn’t also admit to it being a great interest of my own but we see that as a very positive point. It’s essential to be enthusiastic and fully behind any sponsorship that you do and this would be very difficult for me if I had no interest at all in what we were actually doing.

Q. Were other sports besides sailing considered? Which ones?

Yes. The approach caused us to review the “whole market” partly because of my interest! I wanted to be absolutely certain that it would really work for the business, not just for me! We undertook this research in-house as we had just done a branding exercise and knew the values we were looking to associate with bluQube.

Many of the directors here at BluQube are into cars, so we looked at that, but many of our customers are in the public sector and the negative environmental impact of motorsport just wouldn’t look good. Motorsport has performance and speed, but it’s very male, not very clean and a bit too ‘oil & spanners’.

We looked at Rugby, Football and Cricket but they were too expensive, not targeted enough, too ‘mainstream’. Part of the bluQube brand is to be ‘different’.

For similar reasons Wimbledon, Gold Cup / etc. are too ‘classic’ and ‘establishment’ for the brand. Incidentally, we also turned down Ostar 2009 title sponsorship for the same reason.

We had engaged in a branding exercise just prior and this more than anything helped us make our choice. Once we understood the brand values it was a case of finding a sport to match them.

Q. Why was Offshore racing chosen as the platform for the sponsorship?

Ocean racing appealed to us because of the fit with those brand values. It uses modern hi-tech materials, it’s extreme, clean, very team based, it’s high performance, exciting, colourful, and so on.

In addition, we also felt that the events enabled us to tell stories over a longer period rather than just being a single event such as a football match. The events also have genuine human stories and real drama – there is no need to ‘manufacture drama’ as is often the case when watching the media cover other events.

All this gives us content for our communications with customers and prospects and the opportunity to engage with people on topics other than just accounting software.

Q. What are the success factors for the sponsorship?

Brand awareness. Difficult to measure but we see this as an important element in our marketing strategy. The deal with Katie is a 2 year deal so we expect to get benefits over the long term. This kind of activity provides us with content and also allows us to provide something different during long pre-sales cycles.

Q. How will the sponsorship be activated?

For bluQube’s title sponsorship of Katie Miller we have planned a series of monthly marketing activities that will tie into Katie’s race calendar. For example we will issues press releases, include blogs about Katie in our monthly commercial email communications, develop editorial feature opportunities, interviews with/about Katie, use some of the events such as ‘Sailing at Cowes’, ‘Silicon Cup’ for corporate hospitality purposes, attend key events such as the begining and end of OSTAR.

Q. Corporate Hospitality is a bit of a dirty word at the moment. How does this fit into your plans?

A lot of people think about sailing hospitality as sitting on a big launch with a glass of champagne in the sunshine, but that’s not how we do it. We find that being on the boat, meeting Katie, learning the ins and outs of solo sailing gives people are really memorable experience. This is a sport like no other in that respect. You can’t put someone in a scrum on a rugby pitch, but you can give people a taste of what it might be like to sail across the Atlantic on your own.

Q. How will you measure whether you have achieved your goals?

This can be very difficult. Particularly as we don’t expect the sponsorship to directly generate leads as such.

We can only really measure success by ‘proxy’. What we have tended to do is to monitor and record the press coverage that we get and then estimate what the same coverage would have cost us through traditional advertising means.

Having said that, non advertising press coverage is more valuable than advertising (which is often invisible) and this method doesn’t include the value that we get from things like tempting people into our e-mailers by having an interesting extra topic to talk about.

Having said all that, we estimated that Global Challenge sponsorship gave us a return of somewhere between 2 and 5 times original investment depending on how you value things like BBC coverage.

Q. Have you received support from the organisers of the events you have been involved with?

When we sponsored the Global Challenge they had a ‘business club’ – this was a great way to start as it allowed us to learn. At other events, you start off on your own. You have to be there, get your face seen, build relationships. Once you have built relationships you can find what you need, like a spectator boat or access to photography.

Find out more at: http://www.bluqube.co.uk/oceanracing/

Cazenove Capital have announced that they will sponsor Pip Hildesley in her debut OSTAR event starting in May. One of only four women in the race, Pip has already made considerable preparation for crossing the start line. She is now concentrating on re-fitting her boat as ‘Cazenove Capital’.

Robin Minter-Kemp, Managing Director of Cazenove Capital comments:

‘We are delighted that Pip has agreed to have Cazenove Capital as her title race sponsor. She is already familiar to a large number of our clients due to her successes racing with us during Cowes Week. We wish her every success in her preparation for and participation in the 2009 OSTAR race in 55 days’ time.’

The OSTAR single-handed transatlantic race from Plymouth, UK to Rhode Island, USA, is one of the most gruelling endurance tests for sailors. The race is held every four years with an international field which, this year, comprises forty boats.

Technology has made the race even more competitive, resulting in greater proximity between competitors as they battle it out for key positions during the 2,500 mile race. Most competitors enter to test their own abilities and to gain vast experience – Pip Hildesley is no exception to this.

Pip decided to enter the race last year and proceeded to gain match practice by sailing her boat back from South America to Southampton. Despite encountering tempestuous weather in the South Atlantic she arrived back safely into Hamble just over 3 weeks ago.

http://www.cazenovecapital.com/