What makes a sports event memorable for fervent fans, teams, and sponsors? The primary focus, of course, is the incredible performances of athletes who push the boundaries of human potential to make an indelible mark on sporting history.
But there's more to modern-day sporting events. Each event is a mega show where the entire experience counts—a stadium dressed in vibrant team colors and sponsors' logos, attractive event merchandise and memorabilia, and enticing food & beverage areas where fans can re-energize themselves to cheer on their favorite teams a little more.
Creating a cohesive brand identity for a major sports competition requires a comprehensive event branding strategy, meticulously executed visual engagement components, and the support of arduous fans and eager sponsors.
Bringing it all together is the job of a sports branding partner or visual engagement solutions provider—like The Look Company—that creates a memorable look for every event!
Read on to discover the critical role of sports event branding in the success of a mega competition and how The Look Company has partnered with teams, venues, sponsors, and event organizers to create innovative event experiences.
The Art of Sports Event Branding
Sports events have the power to unite fans and entire communities and even bring together a nation.
But organizing a sports event at scale is a costly affair. Ultimately, the event must bring in commercial revenue from sponsorships, brand activations, merchandising and licensing agreements to offset the organizers' investment in the event.
A successful sports event brand becomes a valuable asset that holds not just entertainment value but also means big business for brands and sponsors and significant earnings for sports personalities and team owners.
But sports competition brands are not built in a single event. It takes years of consistent branding to bring fans back to witness a live competition repeatedly, improve attendee engagement year-on-year, and create an impressive reputation for the brand.
Sports event branding is an art and a serious business challenge.
How do marketers build anticipation for a prestigious sports event?
Let's look at how we create a strong brand presence that pulls crowds, generates revenue, and delivers a stunning fan experience.
Advantages of Working with The Look Company For Your Branding Project
The global sporting calendar is filled with a variety of competitions. Event organizers must work in unison with an experienced branding solutions partner to create a distinctive personality for their event and ensure that their event is not lost in a crowded event calendar.
When you partner with The Look Company, we work with you, leveraging our experience with visual engagement solutions for live events to create a distinctive identity for your event.
We work with various elements to shape the image of your brand to build anticipation, make it memorable, and foster a sense of community among fans.
Here's how:
We leverage years of expertise and specialization.
Backed by 20 years of experience, we have mastered the craft of visual engagement at live sports events.
We have delivered stunning visual engagement and event branding solutions for multiple sports stadiums for major events such as the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics, MLB, NHL, Canada Games, and several other world championships.
We specialize in providing cohesive branding elements for stadium branding, interior branding, wayfinding, kitting, city dressing, and vehicle fleet branding. Together, these elements unify the look of events, stadiums, and teams, elevating the event experience for fans, teams, and sponsors.
We bring fresh perspectives and innovation.
For over 20 years, we have been transforming sports environments with award-winning printed graphics and innovative display solutions.
We offer a wide range of innovative engagement solutions for event organizers:
Stadium branding solutions: Showcase sponsor or team brands using bold and striking graphics in and around the stadium, locker rooms, common areas, VIP lounges, F&B outlets and merchandise shops.
City dressing solutions: These include fan zones in live sports arenas, product sampling booths, and exciting city dressing elements at prominent places such as airports, hotels, city markets and squares, or other high-traffic areas.
Wayfinding solutions: We provide permanent or temporary wayfinding signage to direct, inform, and regulate pedestrian and vehicular traffic throughout the sports arena or event grounds.
We deliver high quality, using time and resources efficiently.
Our production facility has state-of-the-art printing equipment and we invest in the best manufacturing technologies and industry specialists.
We're a G7 Master Certified Facility, providing our clients with the best possible results in color management and consistency.
We've won multiple international awards for print quality from FESPA—the worldwide industry association for wide-format digital printers.
The Look Company's Collaborative Process
We work collaboratively with your designers, leading the team with end-to-end services, starting with developing a winning concept, through the design & planning stages, down to project management and installation of stadium graphics and city dressing solutions.
Concept development, design & planning
Our concept and design team are seasoned in crafting innovative display solutions. We work in collaboration with your designers to ideate and plan out the look of the branding solutions that will fulfill your sports event marketing objectives. This includes setting brand guidelines and producing prototypes, technical CAD drawings, site surveys and overlay plans to bring your ideas to life.
Our design team guides you in selecting appropriate signage, materials, and sizes.
Project management and installation
Our team ensures that your event branding project runs on time and on budget. We plan out every detail of your project which includes an audit of the stadium or event venue to determine the types of signage and graphics required for the project.
We handle all the engineering needed to translate the design concept into the various graphical components at the various venues for your event. We can also acquire all the needed permissions and approvals to execute the project. Once the designs are printed, our skilled execution teams ensure a flawless installation of the signage and graphics at the venue.
Showcasing Success: Real-world Case Studies
If you have a vision for your sports event brand, you can trust TLC to get you there, no matter how large the scale or how challenging the venue is!
Don't take our word for it—here are two real-world case studies that prove the point!
The Look Company was the Official North American & Central American Dressing and Signage Provider of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™.
The project was not just prestigious but also vast and varied:
Stadium dressings for 8 main game venues and 108 non-competition venues, such as hotels, conference rooms, exhibition spaces, airports, and media rooms
Printing and installation of branded elements to cover an enormous area of over 900,000 square meters
City-wide installation of about 87 km of fence scrim, 21,693 street banners and 3,300 flags
Interior branding elements, including field-of-play, VIP suites, media centers, team operations, locker rooms and concourses
Designing players' journeys for 32 participating teams, including field-of-play graphics and cohesive branding across concourses, player tunnels, change rooms, and vomitories
Branding of around 150 team vehicles showcasing FIFA visual elements and national flags of the respective teams.
High-impact city dressing and fan environments, with graphics implemented for building facades, cable bridges, fences, and lamp posts
1000 branded signage and sports stadium wayfinding structures installed throughout the city and venues
Onsite branding experts at the final game to execute custom branding for the winning team
Read the detailed case study here.
The Look Company has been the official design and branding partner of the Canada Games for 20 years!
We designed, produced and installed branding across 18 sporting events in 13 different communities.
We used a vast array of custom-made and pre-manufactured products for this project:
Flags
Banner stands and banner poles
Media backdrops
Table skirts
Tents
Pop-ups
Fence scrim
Wayfinding and identification signage
Our team of skilled technicians installed custom elements at each venue. At the same time, a kit of parts with easy-to-assemble, pre-built components was provided to the organizers for use to complete the venue branding.
Read the detailed case study for the Niagara 2022 Canada Summer Games here.
The Look Company: Empowering Organizers for Sports Event Branding
The Look Company specializes in sports event branding, visual engagement solutions for stadium interiors, and eye-catching print graphics for sport and event marketing.
We offer a range of brand activation events, visual engagement solutions, and branding services to transform your live sports venues into engaging and memorable event brand experiences.
Get in touch with TLC today for sports event branding solutions and stadium graphics to elevate your sports competition into an unforgettable event etched in the minds and memories of fans, teams and sponsors!