OPINION “If a sponsor shall be able to reach through to the audience it’s crucial that they share the audience’s passion and help out in boosting the experiences”, communication firm Momentum writes.

Summer is here with that a lot of interesting music festivals all around Sweden. The music styles differ from festival to festival, but most of them have a common denominator – the difficulty to tie commercial partners to their festival.

With a financial crisis deeper than anything since the Great Depression in the 30’s, there is cautiousness at many companies to invest in new marketing projects. Communication budgets generally, and sponsorship budgets especially, are downsized faster than the losers in American Idol fade out into anonymity. This leads to problems for the music festivals to attract new commercial partners. And without the partners, the content and the entertainment at the festivals loose in quality as the possibilities to attract the top bands diminish with the scarce budgets. Add to that the fact that prices on the real hot musical acts have risen during the last years, and think about the Swedish krona’s position as an insignificant currency and you can really understand the problematic situation for festival owners.

Many festivals have already raised their ticket prices this year. But to do that in an effort to compensate for missing sponsorship money is not a good alternative in the long run as the visitors’ price sensitivity is fairly high – even when you look at the fact that the music audience seems to prioritize festivals even in the credit crunch. If prices are too high, and the audience bail out, that will eventually lead to a diminishing interest from potential sponsors. Contact costs per visitor is sadly enough still a reigning comparative value for far too many companies. Still we do think that there is a way out of this dilemma, but that will demand bigger efforts from both festivals as well as sponsors to succeed.

Festivals: The festivals have to improve a couple of things. An absolute must is that they get better hold on their audience, that is who are actually the visitors and how do they act in their daily life? What are they passionate about besides the festivals? What do they dream of and what do they want to do when they grow up? In other words, what is the psychographic profile of the audience? This is the information that a potential sponsor would get the most value out of and that they are willing to pay for – not demographical statistics. Demographics are simply dead when it comes to what more and more marketers are referring to as “passion branding”.