Category Archives: Definitions

One of the most common questions I get asked is “is there another word for sponsorship”?  In previous postings (Anyone Know Another Word for Sponsorship?2009/05/07 and Update on Another Word for Sponsorship 2009/08/12), I’ve discussed the notion of Strategic Cooperative Marketing (SCM) as a means of articulating the essence of effective sponsorship marketing. Since my last posting on the issue, we’ve created an SCM Model that demonstrates the complexity of the sponsorship environment and the elements that must come together in order for an effective, long-lasting exchange to take place between the seller (sponsee) and the buyer (sponsor).

Increasingly we find ourselves minimizing the use of the word [...]

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On my blog post “Anyone Know Another Word for “Sponsorship”, I sounded off about the fact that the word sponsorship may no longer reflect the growing sophistication of the medium. Since that post, I’ve been speaking to a lot of people about the issue, conducting some research and doing some navel gazing of my own to come up with a better alternative. Here’s where I am on the issue:

  • The principle behind sponsorship is still very legitimate in so much that the word implies a commercial (and equal) exchange of value between the property (sponsee) and the company (sponsor).
  • The goal of sponsorship is unchanged – that is to provide opportunities for [...]
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about dropping the word sponsorship from my vocabulary. When I tell people this, they say, ” Bernie, are you out of your mind?  You’ve developed a successful business helping 100’s of organizations generate revenue from sponsorships!”

That may be true, but the problem I have with the word sponsorship is that there’s too much baggage around a word that simply doesn’t correspond with today’s definition of what good sponsorship marketing practices are really about.

For the federal government, there’s still a hangover from the “sponsorship scandal “– which wasn’t really about the medium as much as it was a scandal about process,  greed and inexperienced people [...]

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