• by Darren Marshall , August 7, 2008

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few months, you've read a whole lot of articles about how Olympic sponsors are wrapping themselves in the Chinese flag and playing the nationalism card even more aggressively than John McCain.

I've done research on the last five Summer Olympics (the first three for the IOC themselves), and I've never seen anything like it. It used to be that sponsors would use the Olympics in the same way as the World Cup--a wonderful way to portray a global message of leadership that transcended language barriers. Now it seems every Olympic sponsor has two strategies--one for China and one for everyone else.

So what is it about Chinese culture that makes sports marketing there such a unique challenge, and what lessons does it hold for sponsors after the Olympics? REvolution has been working with one of the sponsors of the Beijing Games to evaluate the impact of its sponsorship on Chinese consumers, and we recently completed the first wave of its ROI survey*. The results reveal five things you need to know to make sponsorship work for you in China beyond the Beijing Games.

1. It's far easier to generate awareness of sponsorship in the uncluttered Chinese market, so you'll be able to use a lower level of spend to activate it. Unaided recall of the top 10 sponsors for Beijing was around a third higher than we've seen in previous Olympics at this stage.

That's because sponsorship is far less developed in China and so there's much less clutter for you to break through to generate awareness. The overall rule of thumb used to be that you needed to spend three times the value of the rights fee to activate a sponsorship properly, and probably closer to five times for an Olympic sponsorship (since you get no TV exposure from signage). The lack of clutter in China means you can use a lower ratio, making sponsorship a really affordable marketing medium in the world's largest nation.

2. Play the nationalism card. It's easy for those who don't know much about China to assume that the Chinese all hate the government and thus, aren't nearly as patriotic as we are here. Not so fast. In fact, they're incredibly proud of being Chinese and of the fact that they're hosting the Olympics. For evidence of this, you only have to look at what happened when we asked about their reactions to the protests around the Olympic Torch Relay.

Almost 90% of those surveyed agreed that the protests were "disgraceful" and that the protesters should "stay out of things they know nothing about" (and for the cynics among you, the opposite of "agree" was not "I disagree, please send me to the nearest labor camp"). To take advantage of this powerful emotion after the Games are over, look long and hard at sponsoring Chinese national teams through the next Asian Games in 2010.

3. Sponsorship is far more effective at enhancing your brand perceptions in China, making it a far more effective medium than in other nations. We've been using the same series of questions to measure the impact of Olympic sponsorship on brand image since the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. In China, 85% of those surveyed said Olympic sponsorship raised their opinion of the sponsor. That's almost three times our average of 30% across all the countries we've surveyed since '92!

Why such a difference? Again, it goes back to lack of clutter and the power of patriotism. Since sponsorship is still somewhat novel in China and consumers still assume that some level of altruism is involved, you get more bang for your buck. We've seen levels of impact in the 50% range in other emerging nations over the years (i.e., Russia), but combine it with that powerful level of patriotism and the results are driven to a new level. It's a similar story when we look at specific image perceptions such as quality and leadership, which are also much more powerfully affected by Olympic sponsorship than in other countries.

4. Because it has a greater impact on brand perceptions, sponsorship in China can have a much greater impact on sales than in other countries. The dramatic impact on awareness and opinion--and particularly on perceived quality with the Olympics--drives the impact of Olympic sponsorship on sales in China far higher than in other nations. Again, we used a standard question to measure the impact of Olympic sponsorship on purchase interest, and we found 75% of Chinese fans saying it made them more likely to purchase the sponsor's products. That's more than double our average from all our other Olympic research.

For our client, the impact was even more evident. We asked respondents to assume our client's product cost 100 "chips." We then asked them how much they would value it knowing that our client was an Olympic sponsor. The value increased by 40% to 140 chips!

5. Ambush marketing is not very effective in China--think twice before you try it. We normally find ambush marketers like Nike do very well when it comes to awareness of Olympic sponsors (Nike is usually somewhere in the Top 5 mentions). Not so in China. None of the top 15 sponsors mentioned were ambushers, and Nike had only 5% awareness--far lower than the leading sponsor (Lenovo, on 50%). Clearly there's a good level of sophistication among Chinese consumers as to who's legitimate and who's not.

*Survey conducted by Knowledge Networks with 500 consumers interested in the Olympic Games in client's target market in 5 major cities in May 2008