It has just been announced that Seat are the new sponsors for the next three seasons of the UEFA Europa League, a massive football tournament across Europe that is followed determinedly and avidly by thousands, if not millions, of fans. As you can no doubt guess, this is a pretty big move by the sporty French car brand, taking then into the realm of the big boys in the automotive industry, who like to prove their importance and get some marketing benefit in the bargain by supporting a major sporting event.
I would image that Seat would be more concerned with using their no doubt vast amounts of sponsorship investment to ensure that they sell plenty of expensive new Seats, rather than to sell a used Seat or two. After all, they are going to be making far more profit from their brand new models, what with all the mark up and the lack of depreciation, and selling shiny new models to an eager audience is always going to be the preferable situation. If they sell a load of used cars of the back of all the advertising and promotion then I am sure they won’t complain, but the real emphasis is going to be on sleek new cars and interesting eye catching colours.
Seat aren’t the first big brand to support a major event like this one, and to be honest I am surprised that they haven’t forced the organisers to rename the whole shebang the “Seat Cup” or something similar. Instead, they have settled for it keeping its name and just being “Presented by” Seat, which to me seems a lot more sensible. However, this isn’t the way that sponsorship campaigns have gone in the past, and it is nice to see a sensible and relevant football based name in amongst the vast range of alcohol and Coca Cola named tournaments and competitions that seem to be everywhere. In fact, this may be one of the few leagues that I actually understand nowadays, as thanks to all of the others being renamed after my favourite tipple I find it particularly hard to keep track of which name refers to which league. It is very confusing indeed!
Aside from my personal grumblings about the name, I do like Seat as sponsors for other reasons. They, to put it simply, seem well suited to the sort of people who will be watching the games. The brand, you see, is quite youthful, and I think I vast proportion of the fans in and out of the stadium are bound to be relatively young. They are also concerned with being perceived as sporty, of course, which is an impression that the Seat brand has been cultivating for as long as I can remember. In fact, you only need to look at the Used Seat Ibiza or the Leon to see that they are a very modern and sporty brand.
Consequently I think they have been chosen well as sponsors, and I imagine they will benefit a lot from the deal.
