B2B brands partnering with sports teams is not a new thing – but it’s not often you see a scale-up brand in a position to partner with a football giant like Manchester United.
Despite being founded in 2019, UK fintech brand Sokin has done just that, announcing a multiyear agreement today (14 August) with the Premier League club to become its official global payments partner, with similar deals struck with the British & Irish Lions and Nottingham Forest earlier in the year.
For its chief growth officer James Hannaford, the decision to involve the brand in sports is a simple one, coming down to building “credibility” in the market. He points out that if you’re a CFO considering moving £100m in payment volume from Barclays to Sokin, for example, that irrespective of the savings on the bottom line and the strength of the deal, if just “one person” in that room doesn’t know who the brand is then there’s immediately a “seed of doubt” on the decision.
B2B brands partnering with sports teams is not a new thing – but it’s not often you see a scale-up brand in a position to partner with a football giant like Manchester United.
Despite being founded in 2019, UK fintech brand Sokin has done just that, announcing a multiyear agreement yesterday (15 August) with the Premier League club to become its official global payments partner, with similar deals struck with the British & Irish Lions and Nottingham Forest earlier in the year.
For its chief growth officer James Hannaford, the decision to involve the brand in sports is a simple one, coming down to building “credibility” in the market. He points out that if you’re a CFO considering moving £100m in payment volume from Barclays to Sokin, for example, that irrespective of the savings on the bottom line and the strength of the deal, if just “one person” in that room doesn’t know who the brand is then there’s immediately a “seed of doubt” on the decision.
“Credibility is crucial for our ability to secure the clients that we need to win,” he tells Marketing Week. “And the reason we use sports is because, ultimately, the quickest way to garner credibility is to align yourself with a credible brand.”
Hannaford is quick to stress, however, that these deals are not “sponsorships” or a mere badging exercise for the brand. All of the clubs are using the Sokin platform as part of the deal, which Hannaford says provides the credibility of a major brand using its platform as well as some useful case studies to take back to potential clients.
“We also get a huge brand awareness piece, which is affiliated with the credibility of that incumbent brand,” he adds.
‘It drives credibility’: Elf Beauty, Adidas and Xero on achieving effective sports partnershipsOf course, none of this is cheap, Hannaford accepts that this is a big outlay for the brand and that while recent funding runs – which has seen the likes of Morgan Stanley and BlackRock invest in the business – has given it increased spending power in the market, it is still not at the same level of the big banks. Proving a return, then, is critical despite it not necessarily being an easy thing to measure.
“We measure it by our ability to convert deals, general awareness metrics, too, of course, but the big thing for us is the conversion rates,” he says.
“And if we look at the Lions tour, for example, that was a really well-timed deal for us because we’re launching in Australia. The number of people who have heard or seen us because of that is huge. Without that tour, we wouldn’t have had the awareness or credibility piece in play, and our conversion rate definitely wouldn’t have been as strong as it is.”
Brand in B2B
The deal with Manchester United comes just a few days after it launched its latest brand campaign, which sees a finance leader speeding through the streets on the back of a cheetah. It is a striking campaign that was intended to cut through the noise in the crowded B2B market – but also build a more human connection with its intended audience.
“It’s so easy, not just in the world of fintech but in any B2B marketing, to fall into this trap of just talking to the business you’re trying to sell to rather than taking a step back and thinking about who in that organisation you are selling to as a person,” he explains. “That’s the really important pivot we’ve made at Sokin. Not selling to the business, selling to the person.”
The modern day CFO, he says, is doing far more than “moving numbers across a spreadsheet” and is instead making strategic decisions that matter to all areas of the business that needs to be “empowered” by tech solutions. Its use of a cheetah, then, is not just a nod to its logo but the creation of a brand character that embodies what it sees its clients and also its product to be.
“The cheetah was around from the very first days of Sokin,” says Hannaford. “We realised there are more assets to the cheetah that we could use beyond a logo. Agility, decision making at speed, the ability to move and change direction when required, which is where we play with our ability to roam. Ultimately, we can empower business leaders with the ability to roam into new markets with far greater ease.”
He is keen, too, that the cheetah doesn’t just become a one-off for a single campaign. Sokin is set to see the cheetah follow through in “all of its positioning” and the business has also looked to embed the character internally as well – departments have been renamed coalitions, for example, and meeting rooms have been named after different elements of a cheetah’s environment. More importantly than these superficial changes, however, is how he wants the team to approach product innovation.
‘The war for attention’: B2B brands on why the role of creativity is ‘much clearer’“The speed of moving a product into market, learning, adapting fast if something doesn’t work, being agile if a product is being well received or not,” he says. “That’s everything that has to come through and follow through internally too. This works inside the four walls we have as well.”
Speed was very much a key element of this campaign, helped by the use of generative AI in the process. Hannaford explains that while half of the advert was shot with traditional methods – the lead actor, for example, was still shot in a studio – the cheetah and the cityscape around him were all developed with generative AI. All told, it helped the brand go from concept to finalisation in around 10 weeks and “probably halved” the amount of time it would have taken without it.
“Being able to early concept in AI is hugely instrumental in allowing you to visualise something to see if you can carry on and go forward with it in terms of the final output and execution,” says Hannaford.
Partnerships and campaigns aside, Sokin is a brand moving quickly in the right direction. Already growing fast – it was ranked Britain’s ninth fastest-growing private tech company by The Sunday Times – Hannaford is confident that the brand still has much more to give.
“We believe that patience is overrated and we’re going at an absolute speed of knots here,” he stresses. “We’re serious about the importance of marketing, certainly in our space, certainly in our stage of business, and what we’re doing now I genuinely believe will be nothing compared to what we’re doing this time next year.”