The Truth About Sponsoring

Katja Erlach

In considering the question of whether, in view of global challenges, the significance of the arts and culture for business enterprises goes beyond mere sponsoring, one has to retain a sense of proportion: companies involve themselves in the arts and culture out of commitment, it is true, but of course this commitment also has a lot to do with marketing considerations.

Promoting the arts and culture in this way often has more exciting and entertaining possibilities as regards development, realisation and impact than other communication instruments. At the same time, the whole idea is associated with the wish to give support and assume responsibility in areas which are receiving less and less public funding.

Sponsoring is in Vogue

There is nothing wrong with following this trend: Sponsoring – in line with a company’s marketing policy – is considered good form these days. And even though times have been difficult, with a resulting loss of confidence in the economy and therefore in financial services providers, no tendency toward giving up sponsoring as a credible communication measure has been noticed. On the contrary: the annual Sponsor Visions¹  study for the crisis year 2009 predicted, for Germany alone, 4.6% growth in the sponsoring volume by 2011. And the trend is still rising – in Austria as well.
Nowadays it is no longer easy to win trust with classical advertising. Sponsoring offers suitable alternatives. Moreover, so-called “hospitality offers” (customer loyalty programmes and employee motivation programmes), especially in the quality segment of the cultural sphere, are true appreciation-bringers and will remain so in the future.

Entrepreneurial and Individual Significance

Sponsoring is good and meaningful. This is indisputable – as are the indirect returns in synergies that are frequently noticed in this context: involvement with culture as an enrichment of the everyday professional routine, the added competences that such an involvement brings to both employees and management and, not least, an increasing interconnection between cultural interests and social commitment. In the context of crossover projects, this leads to new possibilities for injecting life into concepts such as “good corporate citizen” or “corporate social responsibility”.
In the future, however, the significance of the arts and culture in business enterprises will also depend on the individual people in the company. In view of a continuously growing sponsoring market with clearly recognisable shifts in the orientation of projects, extending to the fields of social assistance, media and the environment, competition is intensive and individual commitment all the more in demand.
In truth, however, all this has long been reality as far as cultural sponsoring is concerned.

Full-length text in German:
www.kulturkontakt.or.at/magazin

Katja Erlach is Head of Events and Sponsorship at Bank Austria. Bank Austria is one of the leading cultural sponsors in Austria and focuses above all on young talents in the fields of art and classical music. In addition to cooperation projects with Austrian cultural institutions, Bank Austria is becoming increasingly involved in projects supporting the arts and culture in Central and Eastern Europe. The company’s newest project is the cultural prize “Bank Austria Kunstpreis”, being awarded annually in four categories starting in 2010.
www.kunstpreis2010.bankaustria.at

¹ Information on the research project SPONSOR VISIONS is available (in German) at www.pilot.de.