Corporation A wants to sponsor Club F primarily because it wants to earn more dollars for its Corporation. The market exposure Corp A get from their advertising and sponsorship must outweigh the expenditure to be a viable proposition. Therefore, Corporation A, when approached by Club F seeking sponsorship, will ask to see the research into what they will be getting for their dollar.

Corp A is told that membership is almost 40,000 and that new brand elements are about to come into effect. Corp A asks, “How will the current members like these changes?” and is told “It’s fine, we researched it and as part of the process, the club engaged consultants who were given a brief to research the relevance of the club’s brand elements (name, logo and jumper) amongst its members, supporters, sponsors, stakeholders and other interested parties”

Little does Corp A know but the 2900 members who take part in that online survey in May 2009 are an unreliable sample for the following reasons.
1) It is known that there are 5 memberships in one household and one email address. The person who completes the survey is not the same demographic as the addressee – if it happened in that household, how many others were inaccurate statistically?
2) The preamble does not fully disclose the reasons for the survey
3) The questions are misleading eg What colour training jumper do you prefer? When the real question should be Do you prefer jumper A over jumper B as our home game jumper?
4) Only 10% of the members sample respond to the survey.

If the facts and figures presented by the marketing department to the Corporation are fundamentally flawed, what is the Corporation going to do?
1. Pull their sponsorship and sue the Club for misleading them?
2. Ask the Club to correctly survey the membership making sure that the members know the exact context and relevance of the questions?
3. Ask for an independent audit of the research process?

The Corporation does not want to sponsor a Club whose supporter base has been fractured by inaccurate and misleading research causing hostility and alienation in the members to the point where they will actively oppose buying products from the sponsors.

It is interesting to note that the membership figures for Fremantle Football Club were at their highest in 2007 – 43,343. In 2008 it was 43,366; 2009 was 39,206; 2010 it is 39,854.
The membership was already rising before the changes to the Fremantle brand were announced.
Corporations would be happy to see a rising membership as it means more dollars to them but if the membership is suddenly disenfranchised, the reverse will eventuate.

Membership fees do not bring in enough dollars to sustain the Club but the contents of the wallets of those members supporting the sponsors ,directly and indirectly, do.