Who's the right shirt sponsor for the Wellington Phoenix Women?

The Wellington Phoenix Women's team management have expressed their disappointment at not being able to secure a sponsor. However this difficulty is not unexpected for a couple of reasons:

Short notice

The new team was only announced at the start of September, only 2 months before the start of the season. Sponsors tend to view sports sponsorships in terms of multi-year relationships - one year would be the absolute minimum. Signing deals of this duration isn't typically a quick process. Also, companies don't usually have a lot of spare marketing budget sloshing around to spend on short-notice opportunities like this.

 

Audience Appeal

A sports team has to appeal to viewing audience, and WPW is a New Zealand team playing in an Australian competition which immediately narrows their sponsorship attractiveness. According to an extremely accurate and fully verifiable survey, 78% of Aussie A-League fans used the #NixOut hashtag at least once. This means Australian companies won't be interested, and New Zealand companies doing business in Australia won't want to draw attention to their Kiwiness.

Possibilities

Oppo as a global consumer brand is a great sponsor for the WP Men since they just want to raise their profile and aren't interested in parochialism. However it's unlikely a similar brand like Xiaomi can sponsor the WPW without damaging the WP relationship with Oppo. Maybe a global consumer brand from another category? Amazon and Ikea are planning to expand into New Zealand...

 

By sponsoring the WPM, Spark is both bolstering their Spark Sport brand and diluting the Sky NZ brand (I would love the Sky commentators to have to say "The Spark Wellington Phoenix"). But Spark is also signalling it has no intention whatsoever of expanding into Australia and is only interested in the New Zealand market. There may be other NZ-only businesses in a similar position who want to associate themselves with football - maybe Stirling Sports?

 

KPMG was last year's WPM sponsor. I'm not sold on B2B sponsorship in terms of actual marketing value, but for the WPW it does open the door to being sponsored by a wealthy but boring business that wants to be associated with something more exciting. In these Great Resignation times this type of sponsorship could help with recruitment and retention of young female staff.

 

Another possibility is a local Wellington business that didn't have deep enough pockets to sponsor the WPM and may be interested in a cheaper option. I don't know who that might be.

 

Personally what I would like to see are sponsors that say "We're Kiwi and we're awesome". A double bill of Rocket Lab and Weta Workshop would get it right up 'em.