When you sell sponsorship, the main question you must ask/know about a partner or potential partner is “What is your product’s position in the market?” What position do you want to portray with the dollars you have invested? This will help you and your partner define their objectives for the dollars they are spending as well. Recently, I have seen one brand know who they want to reach and are able to position each of their products differently under their overall brand to do just that. Toyota. Here are three great examples I have seen in just the past month of how to position different products very well to get the attention of and impact a specific demo…three very different demos. This is no accident either by Toyota. This is not a brand that is spreading itself too thin to reach too many people. This is a brand that knows who it’s customers are, and they are smart enough to be able to reach each of them specifically.

 Paris, France

I was walking down the Champs Elysees shopping for stuff that there was no way I could afford, and I took this picture…

This was a great combination of technology, small car convenience, style, and a little bit of World Cup association. All things the local folks in France are all about just like your boy checking the display out right in front of me. Maybe they were a little more psyched about the World Cup stuff 4 years ago, but you get my point.

 Chicago, Illinois

I worked at the 2010 Dew Tour Nike 6.0 BMX Open. (Side bar: this was a great event put on by a great group of folks, if you can make it out to a Dew Tour event this year, by all means, you won’t be disappointed) Toyota is one of the national partners of the tour and have representation at all Dew Tour events. This is a picture of their interactive space in the festival village at the event…

They kept the attention of the people attending the event and created a whole little world that they called “Adreneland”. Great setup for a very specific group. A very important group for them as well.

 World Wide Web, Planet Earth

My buddy who I have to set up and tell you is a family man from the midwest with three beautiful kids and a house in the suburbs showed me the latest viral campaign by Toyota on YouTube…

Fantastically done. Five million views and not a single media buy. It takes a good video that everyone can relate to in order to get that type of exposure. Nailed it.

So, Toyota has impressed me lately with the flexibility of their market positioning using their wide range of products to the fullest. It is all about knowing your position, embracing it and spending money strategically to support it.

I wanted to share a specific idea I thought might be a great way to be the center of it all in your branding or messaging at an event. Everyone wants to be highly visible and creative with their branding. Here’s a way to do so at a rail jam or any rail competition for that matter.

Put your logo on the playing surface…the stairs. At a rail competition, you have a captive audience on one feature that everyone is watching and on which all the photos will be taken. Brand it. Don’t settle for a banner in the background. Take the next step and it will pay off. I mentioned in an earlier post about putting your brand and make your impression as close to where a moment of adrenaline occurs for consumers and the stickiness and effectiveness of the impression will be greater. This is a way to do just that. There is strong purchasing power in moments of adrenaline for consumers whether you are actively doing the sport or activity or even simply watching.

I’ll have to caveat this and make you aware of the fact that a company, Upstairs Media, has a patent on the production and installation of advertising for this specific use (and no they are not paying me to post this…unfortunately) so you will have to use them to execute it. Don’t just create your own and put it in your event…they might hunt you down. I’ve spoken with them in the past and got estimates for my own potenial use. You will pay a premium because they are the only ones who can do this, and they know it. But if the event and audience is big enough, it could be worth it. 

A couple examples of uses of this medium and another example of where you could use it:

So, looking for a creative way to stand out at an event? Think big, think of moments, think right at the center of it all.

Struggling to figure out how to market via the new beast of a medium we call Social Media? Look no further than the dude sitting at the desk next to you. Whether you don’t use it, kind of use it, or are really good at it. A good, FREE, way to start or add to your social marketing value would be to look on the inside. Your employees. We spend time and money trying to gain followers and fans of our brand’s pages, but there is another untapped network out there, all the folks who work for you. Yeah, I’m talking corner office, to interns, to the guy who replaces the urinal cakes.   

 We spend lots of money on media trying to make impressions and promote events at the right time and place. There is a media network out there that is already established that is cheap and easy to get to. Think about how many Facebook fans you have and how many Twitter followers you have on your company’s pages. That is where most people stop. Yes you need to cultivate those, but there is more potential out there. Now do some math with me; say of your employees the casual average users of Facebook would have 150 friends and Twitter would have 70 followers. If you send out a company email to your employees with a suggested status update or tweet and only 20 people choose to post it; 4,400 impressions just went out with your message in it. A status update does have less stickiness than some other forms of media, but it gets your message out there. Now you can’t force employees to post any of your marketing messages. You can only suggest if they would like to. When you think about it though, a large part of all of our personal social makeup is what we do 40 hours (or more) a week, so a fleeting post about what’s going on at work isn’t a crazy invasion of their “social media social lives”, and yet, the network it would reach is very large.

 If you suggest status updates and/or tweets stick with awareness marketing and even trial marketing messages. Awareness could look something like:

 “Here is a great opportunity to donate to the Haiti relief effort if you are looking for one…http://www.yourcompany.com/linktoyourhaitireliefeffortdonationsite.html”

 “Check out 686 rider Louie Vito as he goes for gold against the world in the Men’s Snowboard Halfpipe on Feb. 17… check out his bio at www.686.com”

  Trial messaging could look like:

 “(insert your person of interest) will be at our downtown store for an autograph session next Thursday. We will have (a band) and (festivities) and huge sales on merchandise. Hope to see you there.”

 “Buy one get one tickets on sale at (your website) for the video premiere of (your person of interest) taking place (date, time, location). Come check it out.”

Be aware of the frequency of what you ask employees to post. You don’t want to burn them or their friends out with your propaganda. If you try it, you might be surprised how many people do post your message and how far it will reach. So, looking for a network to amp up your social media marketing. Try looking  to your employees.

I went skydiving the other day for the first time. I’ll just say…do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. Do it. It’s worth it. While we were waiting our turn to jump, there was a guy who came down from the sky doing a buck twenty (terminal velocity). I pegged him to be in his early 80s give or take a decade. Once he got his jump suit off, this guy was rocking a Harley Davidson t-shirt. He had on tapered jeans (not that anyone over 37 would have anything but tapered). He had some black boots that inevitably had steel in the toes. He had a belt on that had some Indian heads or something hot iron stamped in the leather. He was sporting the thinned white haired flat top that you know he started rocking when he was probably in the military at some point in his life. Why describe him? To give you the picture that he and I don’t really have much in common at this exact point in our lives. I Blackberry and DVR. He probably does the Sudoku out of the local paper everyday and drinks Coca Cola Classic. But the day we jumped out of a plane and free fell through the sky, we were bros. On that day, we could relate in a very specific way to each other. We shared the adrenaline you get when you to do something like that.

Action sports athletes, you all know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the first time you land a kickflip indy. I’m talking about the padded fist bumps through the gloves when you and your snowboarding crew are strapped in at the top of a run ready to rip. I’m talking about heaving yourself out of a plane at 14,000 ft. I’m talking about “Gentlemen Start You Engines”. Adrenaline. It fuels us. We can all relate to it. A lot of times, the athletes are tackling the same obstacles, the same pipe, the same park, the same track and can share the same adrenaline. Everyone can relate to each other and thrive from it. Like if your buddy lands a trick they’ve never done, you know you have to try it next.

We stopped for a soda at a gas station on the ride home from the skydiving place. As I walked in, I was still smiling and thought to myself, I’m sure nobody in here right now could even come close to relate to what I just did. It is a select group who can relate to each other via actions sports and the rush it gives you.

(Get out your notebook, it’s lesson time) From a product marketing perspective, I’ll tell you; associate your brand with that adrenaline as best you can. The strongest brand message will happen when consumer feelings and senses are at their highest. I’m sure the old Indian leather belt guy would agree with me that if there were someone trying to sell us something during the free fall, we would have given him all our money. There is huge consumer purchasing power in these moments of adrenaline. Place your brand in these moments and good things will happen.

There are a couple good examples I can think of recently that capture this concept of purchasing power in these moments. The Mt. Dew AMP UP commercials do a great job of hitting us where we can relate:

Click here to watch: Hannah Teter AMP UP

AXE Body Spray has also done a good job with their more light hearted version of the same moment. I might have done it with a little less dude sweat (but I guess it goes with what they are selling), but I definietly remember the commercials from the “Double Pits to Chesty” campaign because it captures that same moment:

Click here to watch: Adam Jones AXE Body Spray

If I could bottle skydiving, I’d Double Pits to Chesty it all day long. Use hard goods and soft goods to let us know we can take that rush to the next level. Use apparel to help us remember the feeling and let everyone know we’ve been there (or would like to be there if you wear apparel and have never tasted the actual sport).  Use your brand advertising and sale (or sampling) of product to help everyone relate to the feeling of adrenaline and passion they get when they are doing what they love and you’ll feel it too…in your pocket book (get it…nailed the metaphor right at the end there).

I know you probably found them useless and thought you’d never have to interact with them again past the 8^th grade, but I have a math story problem for you to ponder. Two trains are headed toward each other. One train is leaving Santa Monica, California carrying Reggie Bush, Devin Hester, and Rajon Rondo. It is stocked completely full of Red Bull. The other train is leaving Chicago, Illinois carrying Chaz Ortiz, Ellery Hollingsworth, Nigel Sylvester, and The Gatorade Free Flow Tour. It is stocked completely full of Gatorade. How fast are these trains going; when will they meet; and who will be on top when they do meet?

There is a marketing trend starting in both action sports and mainstream sports. Brands that have typically been involved in sponsorship of mainstream sports (basketball, football, baseball) are sneaking into sponsorship of action sports, and brands that typically focus on action sports are putting marketing dollars behind mainstream sports. The two main “first movers” of this soon to be trend are Gatorade and Red Bull. Gatorade is sponsoring a peppering of athletes and events across the action sports world at the same time that Red Bull is picking up the sponsorship of athletes such as Reggie Bush and Rajon Rondo.    

My first stab at the answer to this story problem would be no solution. Isn’t that how it goes…if you can’t figure out the problem, make some scribbles on your paper and slap a no solution on it and hope everyone else gets the same thing? Well, that kind of applies in this case. Nobody really knows how these marketing efforts will all meet and what the landscape of each industry will look like when it does. Will Reggie Bush be dropping out of a heli and strapping in somewhere in the back country of AK? Will Shaun White be invited to training camp as an outside linebacker with the Denver Broncos? No (although I would pay to watch both). These newly explored branding efforts are too infant to know exactly how it will all pan out, but it is exciting to think that the popularity of action sports is worth large companies spending money to market them, and it is exciting to know that folks who made their money marketing to action sports have enough cash to sign mainstream athletes. It would be sick to watch an event that has a big air contest followed by a dunk contest. I’ll watch an episode of Fantasy Factory where Rob Dyrdek plays H-O-R-S-E against Lamar Odom. Companies like Red Bull and Gatorade are the ones who will be able to blur the lines between all sports and do it in a way that people will show up. So, although we don’t know exactly what it will look like right now, think about these two trains and know that they are heading toward each other and something special will happen when they meet.