Sports sponsoring: buying a logo or buying a story?

For a long time, sports sponsoring seemed fairly simple. A brand pays to appear on a jersey, around a stadium, on a start arch, or alongside an athlete. The logo is visible. The public sees it. The brand gains awareness.

But today, is that really enough? At a time when consumers are exposed to thousands of advertising messages every day, being visible no longer necessarily means being memorable. And that's perhaps where sports sponsoring is changing.

A logo doesn't tell much of a story

Picture a trail race. At the start line, several brands are present: an arch, a few flags, logos on signage, a stand in the village. The participant sees them. But what will they actually remember?

A meta-analysis published in 2025 in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, covering 31 studies and 15,744 participants, shows that the fit between a brand and the event it sponsors has a positive effect on consumers' cognitive, emotional and behavioral reactions (Liu & Liu, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2025). In other words: simply being present isn't necessarily enough. Consistency matters.

A sports nutrition brand at a trail race seems logical. A car brand that helps participants and organizers get to the start can also create a relevant association, a bit like how Dacia chose to tell an outdoor story without selling a pair of shoes. But a brand that just displays its logo without any real connection to the experience is more likely to stay just one logo among others.

Sponsoring probably shouldn't be thought of as buying visibility anymore

This is where the concept of activation comes in. Sponsoring is the association between a brand and an event, a team or an athlete. Activation is what the brand does with that association. And that difference matters.

A brand can sponsor a race and simply display its logo. Or it can use that partnership to create an experience for participants, content with athletes, a useful service during the race, an initiative with the community, a series of content before and after the event: a story participants actually want to share.

A study published in 2025 in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship looked at what makes a sponsorship activation memorable (International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 2025). Its analysis identifies positive emotion, involvement and heightened experience as key factors: a memorable activation then drives word of mouth and sponsor recall.

And that's probably where part of the future of sports sponsoring lies. No longer just being seen. Being experienced.

Buying a story rather than ad space

Sport has something traditional advertising sometimes struggles to manufacture: stories that already exist. An athlete comes back after an injury. A runner takes on her first ultra. An amateur trains for his first marathon. A team tries to win a race it's never won. A volunteer has taken part in the same event for twenty years.

All these stories exist without brands. And that's exactly what makes them interesting: a brand doesn't necessarily need to create an artificial one, it can fit into a story that already exists.

Saying "we're a partner of this race" is information. Telling "for six months, we followed participants training for their first 100K, and here's what they learned" becomes content. In the second case, the narrative is part of the strategy, just as much as positioning or targeting.

And where does the athlete fit in?

This is also why athletes are taking up an increasingly important place in brands' strategies. An athlete no longer just represents a performance: they potentially have an audience, a personality, a story, expertise, a community, an ability to create content.

Research published in 2025 in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, based on the case of the German Bundesliga, shows that athletes' personal brands can help increase a league's visibility, engage international audiences and open up new commercial opportunities (International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 2025).

This changes the way a partnership is approached. A brand no longer just asks "who's going to win with our product?". It can also ask "who can tell something relevant with our brand?". And those two people aren't necessarily the same.

The champion inspires, the everyday athlete brings the brand to life

This is especially true in outdoor sports. A footwear brand can communicate with an elite athlete capable of running at an impressive pace: spectacular, it embodies performance. But it can also tell the story of a practitioner training for their first trail race, a runner discovering the ultra distance, or a group of friends who've been training together for months.

The first story says: "look how far our product can take you." The second says: "look how our product can support you." These aren't the same messages, and they don't answer the same need. The elite creates aspiration. The everyday athlete creates identification. For a brand that wants to reach an entire community, the two can be complementary.

A logo lets you be present. A story lets you be remembered.

An ecosystem rather than ad space

A good sports partnership can now work on several levels. The event brings the audience and the context. The athlete brings the embodiment. The community brings the interaction. Social media lets the story keep going. The product gives tangible proof. And the brand gives the whole thing its coherence.

That's what explains why some activations keep living on long after a competition ends. The event's calendar is limited. Content, on the other hand, can keep going. A race lasts a few hours. A story can last several weeks.

Should brands stop buying logos?

Of course not. Visibility still matters: a partnership should let a brand be identified and associated with a sporting space. But the logo should probably only be the start of the partnership, not its end goal.

The real question for a brand might be: what are we going to do with this visibility? Because a brand can be visible without being noticed. It can be noticed without being remembered. And it can be remembered without being liked. The challenge of modern sponsoring is perhaps exactly to get through these different stages: creating a coherent association, offering an experience, telling a story, involving a community, and ultimately giving people a reason to talk about the brand for something other than the fact that its logo was there.

Personal takeaway

The best sponsoring might be the kind you forget is sponsoring. That's probably the paradox: when an activation works, you don't think "what an excellent sponsoring operation!", you remember the story instead, an athlete, an experience, a moment you lived.

That might be where the real difference lies between buying visibility and building value around a sports partnership. And in an outdoor world where more and more brands want to speak to the same practitioners, that difference could well become essential.