European Championship sponsors suffer from a loss of awareness

 Shortly before the start of the 2008 European Football Championship, German consumers are only aware of the official sponsors to a limited extent. Surprisingly, awareness of the companies has decreased rather than increased over the past six months. At least that is the result of a recent survey by the market research institute Innofact. The only exception is the beverage giant Coca-Cola, which was able to increase its brand awareness between December 2007 and May 2008 thanks to massive advertising activities. Apart from Coca-Cola, whose brand awareness increased from 24 to 27 percent (unaided) and 68 to 70 percent (aided), hardly any of the European Championship sponsors are currently being properly recognized. For example, the aided awareness of Adidas, supplier to the German national team, was 68% in December and only 58% in May. In third place in the perception ranking is McDonalds, whose awareness level also fell slightly from 59% to 58%. Mastercard has also lost three percent over the past six months and is now named by 43 percent of respondents as an official partner of Euro 2008. Far behind are companies such as Carlsberg, Canon and JVC.
"We assume that sponsors will now really get going again with their public relations work and that awareness will increase again just before and during the European Championships," predicts Hagemann, project manager at Innofact, to Pressetext. It is striking that companies such as Nike, Puma and Bitburger are currently being perceived much better and incorrectly as sponsors. National sponsors, on the other hand, seem to receive hardly any attention at all. With Telekom Austria in tenth place, there is only one brand in the top ten.