ABSTRACT
Throughout this text, the focus has been on demonstrating the key success factors for successful sponsorship. Exploitation is one of those. Sometimes referred to as leveraging or activation, this is where the sponsorship rights are supported by marketing communications by the sponsor in order to achieve sponsorship and ultimately communications objectives. The purchasing of a set of sponsorship rights by a sponsor is invariably not going to be enough for the sponsorship to be successful or to maximize the potential return on investment. The rights need to be exploited via the use of further communications. Traditionally these may be seen as ‘extra’ because they are not supplied by the rights owner along with a set of rights. However, a significant issue for sponsorship is the prevailing misconception that sponsorship rights alone will achieve their objectives. Another issue is that there is also insufficient understanding and use of these as integrated communications. This chapter will therefore consider the important role that integrated exploitation must play.
