Chinese firms score with sports pitch
Brands connect with fans as nation emerges as global sponsorships force
The rising profile of Chinese companies as sponsors of major international sporting events is catching the attention of spectators, and brand experts say the trend will only increase as more companies scale up their ambitions to go global.
Four Chinese companies — Alipay, Hisense, TikTok and Vivo — sponsored this year’s just-concluded Euro 2020 soccer tournament. Together, they accounted for a third of official sponsors and made China the biggest source of sponsorships for the event, officially called the UEFA European Football Championship.
“As Chinese brands globalize, sponsorship of global sports events provides one of the most potent platforms for those outward-looking brands to build awareness,” said Mark Thomas, managing director of S2M Consulting, a China-focused sports event company. “However, we are currently only seeing a first (iteration) of this evolution, with key Chinese brands tending to focus on sponsorship of major tier-one event properties, such as the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and the Euro.”
Thomas said there are also “many more nuanced opportunities” in the global sports ecosystem “that offer more effective means of return” that Chinese brands are likely to explore.
Chinese payment platform giant Alipay signed an eight-year deal to become a sponsor, from 2018 to 2026, of the UEFA men’s national soccer tournaments, which include Euro 2020, Euro 2024, and the UEFA Nations League finals.
The deal was reportedly worth 200 million euros ($237 million), according to sources cited by the Financial Times. Under the agreement, Alipay, which is operated by Ant Financial Services Group, became the sports body’s official global payment partner.
Chinese home-appliance maker Hisense is no stranger to using a sponsorship strategy to drive global awareness of its brand. In 2016, it became the first Chinese sponsor of the UEFA soccer championships, and in 2018 it was a major sponsor of the FIFA World Cup.
The benefits of partnering with far-reaching global sporting tournaments were obvious for Hisense, which reported overall sales surging by 274.4 percent, year-on-year, during the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Mark Dreyer, founder of the China Sports Insider website, which tracks trends in China’s sports industry, said: “This is kind of triedand-tested strategy that has worked for Chinese brands, particularly the consumer electronics brands.”
‘Universal appeal’
Paul Temporal, an expert on brands and an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Said Business School, said: “Sports sponsorships are now extremely expensive, but the world’s top brands are willing to pay, as sport has universal appeal. It is one category that attracts people from all nations.”
Temporal said sports sponsorships offer “an advantage over normal advertising and promotion” because they offer “a better chance of standing out among cluttered communications and addressing huge, targeted markets in a specific way”.
During the past decade, with rapid growth in the domestic market, Chinese companies have enjoyed a remarkable expansion in their brand value.
According to a report by London consultancy Brand Finance, 11 of the world’s 25 most-valuable brands are now Chinese.
David Haigh, chairman and chief executive of Brand Finance, said: “Chinese brands in many fields are now blossoming in Western markets, and are preferred by consumers on their product and service fundamentals.”
With China arguably now the world’s largest market for soccer, Haigh said: “Sponsoring UEFA exactly fits with that growing position in the sport and provides a conduit for Chinese brands, back to their domestic audiences as well as their international fans.”
Dreyer shares this view. “Certainly, there is a sense of pride and patriotism when the Chinese fans see the brands (at the soccer games).”