Sponsorship of Snooker Players by Royally Touch Floor

Chinese wooden floor manufacturer Royally Touch Floor sponsored snooker players Stuart Bingham and Shaun Murphy in January 2016 who both played in the 2016 dafabet Masters held in London, UK. The recordings of the players’ games were fully broadcast on Chinese national sports TV channel, CCTV 5, while the brand created its own media campaigns on the Internet. This deal was negotiated by Yutang Sports. 

The industry of wooden floor is very mature in China, having many brands and much competition. It is difficult for brands to gain advantages through traditional means like lower prices. Brand construction is what is needed for a breakthrough in the competition. In 2016, as a fairly good brand in the industry, Royally Touch Floor adopted Yutang’s suggestion sponsoring snooker players. The idea is to achieve big using a small budget. 

First, sports sponsorship and snooker are identified as the approach. Sponsorship of entertainment or TV advertisements is usually expensive, while sports sponsorship is popular and has good ROI. After considering the costs, exposure, social attention, and player image rights, Yutang Sports recommended snooker players as a solution. 

Two players were identified as ideal targets: Stuart Bingham who was the Champion of 2015 World Championships, and Shaun Murphy who was the Champion of the last Masters. These two players both had good potentials for winning the game. Besides, Stuart Bingham would play against Chinese snooker player Ding Junhui at his first game, which would ensure Chinese TV broadcast. 

The result was good. CCTV 5 fully recorded the game of Stuart Bingham vs. Ding Junhui, a 110-minute game and broadcast it, and had an audience rating of 0.31. The brand logo wore by the player on his waist coat gained big exposures as most of the time the camera was on the players. To achieve the same exposure by other sponsorship means, the cost would be at least a few times or even 10 times higher. 

Public exposure on TV and brand image association was not the only benefits. Royally Touch Floor created an editorial where they added funny conversation bubbles for the players on photos of the games, and distributed it on digital media and social media. The editorial enlarged the effects of this sponsorship. 

On a plenary meeting of distributors of Royally Touch Floor in January, videos of the players were played. 

This sponsorship by Royally Touch Floor helped the brand achieved two goals: one was to strengthen the brand construction, and the other one was to encourage the distributors. The choice of the two snooker players by Yutang Sports as the solution and the use of social media by Royally Touch Floor to activate this sponsorship helped realize the strategy of achieving big using a small budget. 

Wait to see what Royally Touch Floor would do for the China Open in March 2016.