What I learnt... about sponsoring a football stadium
Nick Grey, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Gtech, a home and garden equipment brand based in Worcester. He became the stadium sponsor of high-flying Premier League team Brentford FC last July as part of plans to raise its profile. The deal to name the club’s ground the Gtech Community Stadium was for ten years and cost a multimillion-pound sum. “We see this as a way to help create global demand for Gtech,” Grey said at the time. As the football season draws to a close this weekend, he reflects on how the sponsorship has worked in its first year.
As a one-off commitment it’s the biggest we have ever done
With marketing and branding, some spend you know exactly where it goes and you watch it home, and other spend you pat it on the back and send it off. You don’t know how or when it’s coming home, but hope it does. Brentford is one of those.
I wanted to be associated with a club that I would be proud of, and I very much have been. But the return on the sponsorship will be a slow burn. Anecdotally, people notice it and it gets great coverage, especially given that they have done as well as they have.
When I’m talking to you, they have only lost two matches there in the whole season so far. The very first match at the Gtech stadium on August 13 they beat Manchester United 4-0. It was incredible. I’d promised to take my children to the Boardmasters festival in Cornwall as it was the only thing they really wanted to do all summer. And that clashed with the first game. We were in Newquay watching it and it was amazing.
I was there when they gave Liverpool a 3-1 drubbing as well. Their on-field achievements haven’t surpassed our expectations because the reason we sponsored them was because we thought they were very well run and they would put a competent Premier League side out. And they very much have.
When you invest in an institution like a football club the actual sporting achievements are key. You don’t want to be associated with a team that doesn’t have a feel-good factor around it. If the team is doing well it adds a lot to the brand feel. Brentford are a tremendously successful organisation and have been for the past ten years, so we were hoping they would have a successful year and were proud when they did.
There is some passivity in the sponsorship
You hope that on Sky Sports and Match of the Day they mention the stadium as often as possible, and sometimes they do and sometimes they get it wrong and forget it is the Gtech stadium, which is tremendously frustrating, but it happens.
We have seven or eight minutes of LED screen time, which are broadcast. The viewing figures for Premier League football around the world are incredible so it gives us an opportunity to have different content seen by a global audience. There are some games that don’t get seen that much, but it’s good if a goal happens to go in against one of the big clubs when Gtech are on behind the net, as the first goal against Manchester United.
But really you sit back and hope that people are talking about the Gtech stadium as a successful place. This year it very much has been.
You don’t get endorsements
Premier League footballers are incredibly busy, are tremendous athletes and they are brands in themselves. We have tried not to be a pain — say, asking them to visit Worcester two hours away. But we will go to the end-of-season awards and hopefully get a chance to mix a bit with the squad and tell them how proud we are of them.
We are going for the global TV coverage
That is what is important for us. It takes time to brand the ground. With Brentford being right next to Heathrow airport we are waiting on getting the roof branded, which is taking a long time. I can only imagine the number of people who have landed at Heathrow and who would have seen the Gtech stadium but didn’t know where it was without the roof branding.
That is one thing we want to get in place as soon as possible and are working on with the club.
We can learn more and leverage it more as we progress. The owner, who is a genius, and the people who run the club do it extremely well and keep a low profile. So we are not going to try and drag them out into the spotlight.
We try to make sure our interests are aligned
The more successful the club is, the better for us and the better for them. There is an element of risk as, if they were to get relegated, the media associated with the Championship is a tiny percentage of the Premier League. There is some flexibility allowed between the two of us, but we see it as a long-term arrangement. We didn’t expect it to transform Gtech overnight but we hope that being associated with such a successful outfit will show benefits over time, and certainly in countries where Gtech has not done any marketing or brand building.
Nick Grey was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of Times Enterprise Network
