The Event Partnership Framework: What 99% of Drinks Brands Get Wrong
Leading to Events with Hidden Costs After Which Trialists Never Find that Brand Again) and What to Do Instead.
Dear Drinks Builder,
Since I was a marketing manager, I have received weekly requests about partnership events.
Big and Small ones. They went from a couple of cases of beer at a cool clothing shop to Beer Fairs to Sponsoring Festivals.
Initially, I was pretty loose. I trusted our local distributors as they knew about cool brands and events in their cities. On top of that, I was still in my ethereal brand-building state of mind and loved those PDFs I got full of photos of cool people at previous events.
FOMO was kicking in. It was a no-brainer. The more small fires, the better, I thought.
The thing was that I had small marketing budgets available so I thought those events just costing us a few cases instead of real money were a good deal.
The Fancy Marketing Spend Effectiveness decks I had been trained on, held the truth:
If 200ish cool people of our “Target Consumers” (yeah right, those 25-35 AB+ Cool Urbanites suggested by a Consumer Report) were sampling our brand, for a small cost, the ROI was positive and they were worth it.
On top of that, my random target set to be a success was 200 people and I had 220. Well done, Chris. The random target of Cost per contact was also a winner.
The issue is that it’s not about Target Consumers not about whether Immediate ROI is positive or not. It’s about whether it’s overall worth it long term. Money isn’t everything. There’s much more.
But why are Brand Owners confused? Because they focus on the wrong points.
They usually think about:
Will it drive PR?
How much is gonna cost?
What type of consumers are gonna be there?
Is the brand gonna be sampled for free or sold?
This leads to focus on the wrong obvious aspects:
1. They think it’s about the Target Consumers.
We’ve been trained to think to follow the Consumers’ Pathways aka wherever they go but every consumer is many different people at the same time, depending on the occasion and the need they have. To make it simple, if your brand is catering an aperitif low-tempo type of occasion, sitting and relaxing, what makes you think you should recruit consumers at an outdoor festival? Yes, you may want to approach those people but they don’t care about a brand like yours on that occasion. They want something that fits that occasion.