Marketing Plan and Sponsorship Proposal for TomorrowWorld

刘师雯

湖州师范学院 浙江省湖州市 313000

Introduction

TomorrowWorld is the branch of Tomorrowland, the world's largest and most famous electronic music festival, in the United States. Since entering the US market in 2013, the event has achieved the status and honor of the best music festival in the United States, but since it was destroyed by extreme weather in 2015, the program has never returned to the US market. Therefore, this article will give a marketing plan for TomorrowWorld to return to the US market and give a sponsorship proposal accordingly.

MARKET PLAN

Target markets and positioning

According to a new Nielsen report, 32 million people attend music festivals in the U.S. each year, 46% of them are younger generations aged 18-34, in addition, music festivals are most popular among Hispanics and African American populations. So TomorrowWorld’s main target market is focused on this group of people.

Since its inception, TomorrowWorld followed Tomorrowland’s pace to upload the official movie of the best moment during the event on YouTube. This behavior directly expanded the brand awareness and made topics in global discussion. Such targeted promotion has left Tomorrowland with professional and hot scene and a wide coverage impression in the mind of many people who pay attention on music festivals.

Implementation and control

For the event to be completed smoothly, it is necessary to control the communication with stakeholders and the risks that exist. Communicating with different stakeholders requires different ways of communication. This requires the organization to determine the purpose of communication before the exchange, mainly including the needs of the other party, how to establish brand awareness and attitude, how to influence the other party's willingness to purchase after the official music festival (Kotler, 2016:587). Risk control requires organizations to conduct risk assessments prior to the event to prevent previous mistakes.

Sponsorship proposal

Fit and benefits of the sponsorship agreement for both parties

According to Pentecost and Spence's (2004) research, it is proved that there are six suitable dimensions for the sponsors, namely target market, image, geography, typicality, complementarity and clash.

Budweiser was originally a sponsor of Tomorrowland, so its target market and image is fit for the marketing plan. The company's LDA music strategy, which began in the US as early as 2012, is now focused on working with EDM festivals and using music for global marketing activities. This allows the two sides to agree on geography and typicality, all want to occupy an important position in the US market. Because it is held in bars and cafes, the most needed is drink, and Budweiser needs to present its brand in the form of music, and the two sides are perfectly complementary. Because the conflict is contrary to the sponsor's complementarity, there will be no conflicts in this sponsorship. Such a strategy is fully compliant with the Pop-up concert plan and in the absence of conflict.

Sponsorship is a reciprocal process. This advantage is reflected in the fact that the sponsee can maximize the benefits of the sponsor, and the sponsor can maximize the value of the sponsee. TomorrowWorld can increase the brand image of Budweiser to the market of younger generations in the United States through experience marketing, increasing the company's sales opportunities in the younger generation. For TomorrowWorld, Budweiser has the advantage that Budweiser has been developed in the American music market for six years, with a certain crowd base and good image. This can make up for the image and re-establish a professional image. There is also a very practical benefit that Budweiser can reduce the economic expenses of the event site. Although this one-month free event can be undertaken for Tomorrowland, the purpose of this event is to test the market's tolerance and acceptance of TomorrowWorld. If the results are not satisfactory, the economic loss of this event will not be recovered.

Budget and its justification

It is important to break the budget down as much as possible (Reic, 2017:267), so there are only a few essential expenses for the activity that equalize the income of the activity. As can be seen from the table, the biggest expense of the activity is public insurance, which is the way the activity wants to regain public trust. In order to save the venue fee, the activity also receives some rebates to make up for the difference. Another point worth mentioning is the advertising fee. Since the video is posted on YouTube, there is no charge, but the activity can also earn some fees through click-through rate.

Evaluation strategy

TomorrowWorld's expected result for this event is to be able to get strong feedback and reshape its image in the United States. Budweiser's expected result is to increase sales of the products through music festivals. The expected results of the two are different, so the strategy of evaluation is different. For TomorrowWorld, which wants to create an image of the event, the number of times the activity on the network is mentioned, the click rates of the event video, and the number of news reports can be collected to visually see whether the event was successful and caused the expected response. It is not enough to know whether the event is causing attention. It is also necessary to know whether the publicity effect achieved by this event is positive or negative. Therefore, TomorrowWorld can also collect formal and informal feedback from participants who attend the event (Rines, 2002). Then through the ratio of positive feedback and negative feedback, whether the event successful or not, the sponsorship is effective or not. For Budweiser, the evaluation of the sponsorship results will be much simpler. The effectiveness of sponsorship can be seen by comparing the sales of local products before and after the event.

作者简介：刘师雯（1997-07-07），女，汉族，籍贯：上海，当前职务：学生，学历：大学，研究方向：活动策划。