The Etihad Airways office in Abu Dhabi receives around 200 requests a week from teams, leagues and individuals from all around the world to look at the possibility of a sponsorship deal.
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Most of them are politely turned down. Because when you are the national carrier of the UAE, you can’t put your logo on any and every sporting event that comes your way. It’s a matter of prestige and exclusivity which can’t be traded so easily.
“It shows how selective we are in making sure that it’s the best decision for our business. We are focused on being the number one airline in the world and we make sure we are in line with the best,” Patrick Pierce, vice-president sponsorship for Etihad Airways, reveals.
Whether or not they receive 200 requests a week, a month or a year, the fact remains Etihad Airways are incredibly selective when it comes to putting their logo on a jersey, tournament or a venue.
A look at its major partnerships across the sporting world shows that they want to be associated with only the elite, be it with Manchester City in the English Premier League, Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League or Melbourne City FC in the A-League.
Only when you look at what Etihad Airways have ‘refused’ over the years do you get to understand what they are actually looking for and why.
“Let’s take South America for example. We only fly to one city once a day. We don’t expect to do a deal in Argentina or Venezuela or Chile. No matter how big the team is and how popular they are, they are not going to help us with our commercial goals in generating more traffic on our flights because we don’t go there,” Pierce explains. So no deals with Sao Paulo or Boca Juniors then.
“The US is important to us but we don’t fly to Miami. So (even when) Le Bron James was with the Heat, we couldn’t be the official partners. “Even now that he is with Cleveland Cavaliers… thanks, but we are not coming there.”
But there is more to a sponsorship deal than just lining up alongside the best team/league/event. Because at the end of the day, it has to make business sense.
“It is a mix of both pride and business sentiments. But it’s about business revenue opportunities. In the end, it must have a revenue component to it for it to be valuable,” Pierce adds. “It not just about a logo on a shirt but also whether we can fill more cabins by sponsoring a team or a club.”
Keeping these two factors – image and economic viability – in mind, the process of associating with a team or an event as sponsor begins. There are many aspects that come into consideration but for an airline, it all boils down to one key question – will the carrier generate more traffic with the association? Just like a real estate agent searches for properties with one eye on ‘location’, Etihad too give geography prime importance.
New York, Mumbai and Melbourne are financial centres of formidable economies and gaining more traffic in that sector is a lucrative prospect. Hence, the alongforay into IPL, MLS and Australia’s A-League. But even here, the airline has to take into consideration what type of audiences or travellers are likely to fly with Etihad owing to their sporting tie-ups. Whether the sporting fans travel longer distances, in bigger groups, and are willing to spend more to take premium cabins counts. No wonder destinations like New York and Washington DC looked so appealing for Etihad. To gain a foothold, they employed two strategies.
First, they tapped into the New York sector through an association with MLS team New York City FC and then gained entry into Washington through not one but three sports.
“New York City FC is our marquee partner in MLS. They play in the Yankee Stadium so they align themselves with one of the best known clubs in the world. And recently, we got into a sponsorship deal with Monumental Sports and Entertainment.
“It owns an NBA basketball team (Washington Wizards), NHL hockey team (Washington Capitals), women’s basketball team (Washington Mystics) and stadium in Washington (Verizon Center).
“This was our first entry into these US sports and first sponsorship with women’s professional team. It was all about connecting the capital city of the UAE to that of the US.”
So the sponsorship journey that began in 2007 has resulted in Etihad’s prominent presence in almost all continents. At the top of the chart is the lucrative deal with Manchester City, the iconic club now playing its home games at the renamed Etihad Stadium following a deal reportedly worth £400m (Dh2.3bn) for a period of 10 years. Add to it the naming rights of what was the Docklands Stadium in Melbourne (renamed Etihad Stadium at a reported $5-8million deal originally), presence in the US market through MLS, in India through Mumbai Indians, and association with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Etihad is now visible across sport.
These associations involve a lot of investment and business partnerships are ultimately driven by numbers. One way to gauge the impact of a sponsorship deal on the brand is by calculating the ‘advertisement equivalency value’, or in simpler terms, the returns on say putting a logo on shirts which is calculated by the amount of visibility gained in print and TV. In this parameter, Etihad’s association with Mumbai Indians seems rather profitable.
“For Mumbai Indians, that return is 10 to one. So the logo that we have on the kit and the coverage that we see on TV and print and online, we are getting 10 dollars back on the investment,” Pierce explains.
The impact of these deals can be assessed through another, simpler, piece of data – air traffic. According to Etihad, around 7,000 fans travelled with Etihad for last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix while around 10,000 flight bookings are said to be a direct result of trade promotion around the Mumbai Indians. All these endeavours lead to one target – improving brand perception. How flyers look at Etihad if they align themselves with teams and leagues has an impact on any possible association. It’s on these factors that MLS in the US and IPL in India tick many boxes.
“Football is the number two most participatory sport in the United States, something like 13 million people play ‘soccer’. MLS has average attendance of 18,000 which is in the top five or six leagues in the world. They have gone from 10 clubs 15 years ago to 20 now and probably 24 in the coming years. The trajectory of football in the US is similar to the trajectory of the brand of Etihad,” Pierce says.
“As for Mumbai Indians and IPL, it’s been a good amplifier of our ‘Flying Reimagined’ brand. T20 is cricket reimagined. The IPL is a far more appealing, faster and family friendly.
“It’s an incredible story. We are making the same kind changes in flying experience. We like that association. They are in a key market for us and it’s one of the few sponsorships that we share with one of our airline partners – Jet Airways.” It’s an exhaustive process but for the UAE’s national airline, only the best will do.
