Is B2B changing sponsorship?

For decades, sponsorship has largely been built around a B2C logic.

We put a consumer brand on the biggest possible stage, reach as many people as possible, build awareness, create positive associations and, ideally, we turn that attention into preference and purchase. It's a model that has worked extremely well for sports and entertainment, and it is certainly not going away anytime soon. Yet something appears to be changing.

If we look at the brands increasingly appearing alongside some of the world's most valuable sports properties, we see a pattern starting to emerge. Technology companies, enterprise software providers, cloud businesses, AI & data platforms and other B2B organisations are becoming increasingly visible in sponsorship. Snapdragon at Manchester United, TCS across the world's major marathons, Visma in professional cycling and, more recently, companies such as Circle at Chelsea and Temporal at Crystal Palace all point in the same direction.

The interesting question here is not simply why more B2B companies are sponsoring sport, but we should ask ourselves what their presence tells us about where sponsorship is heading.

Because the shift from B2C to B2B is not really a shift from one type of sponsor to another. It's really a shift in objectives, expectations and ultimately in the way value needs to be created by rights holders.

Sponsorship was built for reach

The traditional sponsorship model is fairly easy to understand.

A brand pays a rights holder for access to an audience and in return, it receives visibility, association and a range of assets that can be activated through advertising, content, hospitality and experiences. The larger the audience, the more valuable the property is generally perceived to be.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this model. Visibility remains an important objective, and sponsorship remains one of the most powerful ways for brands to build awareness and emotional association at scale. Our own State of Sponsorship research in Belgium confirmed this last year, with brand awareness remaining the number one objective for brands evaluating sponsorship opportunities.

However, the problem starts when visibility becomes the objective rather than one of the tools for achieving a broader business goal.

That distinction matters because the marketing environment around sponsorship has changed dramatically in recent years. Attention is scarce, audiences are fragmented and consumers are increasingly selective about where they are willing to spend their precious time. Simply being seen is becoming less meaningful if the context in which a brand appears has little relevance to the people it actually needs to influence. This is why we truly believe the future of sponsorship will be less about maximising reach and more about maximising relevance.

And exactly that is why B2B in sponsorship becomes particularly interesting.

The B2B buyer is still a human being

For a long time, B2B marketing was fairly simple and dominated by rationality. Lead generation, product demonstrations, white papers, webinars, trade shows, performance marketing and sales enablement were the traditional tools of the trade. The assumption was that business decisions were fundamentally different from consumer decisions because the stakes were higher, the buying journeys were longer and more people were involved.

All of that still remains true, but there is one obvious element that is sometimes forgotten: the people making B2B decisions are still people.

These people have their own preferences, emotions, ambitions, communities they belong to and sports teams they support. They form opinions about companies before they ever enter a sales conversation and, just like you and me, they want to work with organisations they trust, understand and perceive as credible.

This creates an opportunity for sponsorship. For a B2B brand, sponsorship can create something that traditional lead generation often struggles to deliver: emotional proximity.

It can put a relatively complex company into a context that people already care about. It can make an unfamiliar technology brand more recognisable. It can create credibility through association. And, when designed properly, it can provide access to exactly the stakeholders that matter, whether those are customers, prospects, partners, employees, investors or future talent.

The objective therefore does not have to be "make everyone know us". It could be "make the right people know us, trust us and understand what we stand for". That shift leads to a very different sponsorship brief for rights holders out there.

From audience size to audience quality

This might be the most important change we're seeing. A B2C brand may genuinely still need mass awareness. A global consumer electronics company, bank or automotive brand can still benefit from reaching tens or hundreds of millions of people.

A B2B technology company will however very likely have a much smaller universe of potential buyers. If your target audience consists of senior IT decision makers, procurement leaders, CEOs or a very specific professional community, reaching another five million people who will never buy your product is not necessarily creating more value for your business.

The question becomes: where do those people spend their time, what communities do they identify with, and which environments give a brand permission to engage with them?

This is where the right sponsorship can become extremely powerful in the world we are living in today. We've mentioned them before, but Tata Consultancy Services provides one of the clearest examples. TCS has built a global sponsorship platform around marathon running, partnering with 14 major running events across the globe. The strategy goes well beyond placing the TCS name around a race: through technology partnerships and race applications, TCS can demonstrate what it actually does while engaging an audience that includes a high concentration of business decision makers. A study, which you can find on the Brand Finance website, found TCS familiarity at 46% among marathon runners compared with 16% among non-marathon runners.

And this is a fundamentally different proposition from simply buying impressions. Their partnerships give TCS a relevant audience, but it also gives the company a role within that ecosystem which is becoming increasingly more important.

The rise of the B2B sponsor is therefore not accidental

Look at some of the most recent examples.

Snapdragon, Qualcomm's consumer-facing technology brand, became Manchester United's front-of-shirt partner in 2024 after an existing strategic collaboration. The partnership combines enormous global reach with technology-led fan experiences, including an augmented reality experience activated through the shirt. Qualcomm has explicitly linked the partnership to building awareness, understanding as well as affinity for Snapdragon and its role across billions of devices.

Dstny took a different route. The Belgian business communications company used professional cycling as a platform to build awareness for a new European brand identity, while also creating opportunities to connect with clients, partners and prospects through hospitality and experiences around the sport. Dstny itself described cycling as a way to build trust, brand recognition and relationships in the business community, but unfortunately decided to discontinue the partnership relatively quickly as compared to other examples who are still actively engaging in cycling sponsorship (e.g. Visma).

Aside from these two, we then have some examples from even more recently.

ClickHouse, a global data and AI infrastructure company, became Fulham FC's principal partner and front-of-shirt sponsor for the 2026/27 season. The partnership includes visibility across the club's shirts, stadium and digital channels, as well as supporter-facing experiences.

Temporal, an AI and enterprise technology company, has similarly moved onto the front of Crystal Palace's shirt for the 2026/27 season. And just last week, Circle (with their USDC brand), became Chelsea's front-of-shirt sponsor.

All of these deals, as well as plenty others, are interesting not because technology companies have suddenly discovered football. For us, they are interesting because they illustrate how sports properties can become platforms for building the brands of companies whose products may otherwise be invisible to the general public. There is still great value in reach, yet relevance is at least equally valuable. It all depends on the challenges the brand is facing, which is the basic foundation needed to establish the objectives and KPI's which determine what sports, platforms and assets are relevant to consider.

But visibility still matters

It would be too easy to turn this into another "logos are dead" article. Logos are definitely not dead (and probably never will be).

Visibility remains very valuable, particularly when a company is trying to build awareness in a new market, launch a new brand or establish credibility at scale. In fact, one of the reasons sponsorship can be particularly attractive to B2B companies is precisely because it can accelerate brand recognition far beyond what their conventional marketing activity might achieve. The halo effect is real.

The mistake today is not buying visibility, but it's assuming visibility is the entire value proposition in a sponsorship package. We need to be asking ourselves the question of what happens after a fan has seen the logo.

Can the brand demonstrate its expertise? Can it create meaningful experiences for clients? Can sales teams use the partnership? Can employees participate? Can the rights holder provide access to relevant audiences? Can the partnership strengthen employer branding? Can the brand create content that makes its proposition more understandable?

Sponsorship will start moving from media inventory towards business infrastructure.

From sponsorship package to business platform

This evolution also changes the role of the rights holder in the current market. If a B2B company wants to use sponsorship to build relationships with specific business audiences, a generic partnership package is unlikely to be enough. The rights holder needs to understand who the brand is trying to influence, why those audiences matter and what the brand needs to achieve.

Our 2025 State of Sponsorship research found that brands want true partnerships rather than generic packages, while 37% of sponsorship and marketing professionals indicated that they do not feel properly understood when speaking to rights holders. Our 2026 results will soon be available too, but from what we've seen so far is that the situation in Belgium has not evolved unfortunately.

In a B2B context that becomes even more relevant, and increasingly important.

A B2B sponsor does not necessarily need another hospitality allocation or another hundred thousand impressions. It may need ten conversations with the right decision makers, access to a particular business community, an opportunity to demonstrate its technology, a platform for its employees or it may need to invite prospects to something they genuinely want to attend.

The rights holder therefore has to move from selling assets to solving actual business problems, which is a much more demanding proposition but also a much more valuable one.

Sponsorship becomes cross-departmental

There is another reason why the B2B shift matters and deserves extra attention.

Once sponsorship is no longer evaluated purely as a marketing channel, other departments naturally become part of the conversation: sales can use it for client relationships and prospecting, HR can use it for employer branding and employee engagement. Corporate communications can use it to strengthen reputation and procurement and leadership can look at it as part of a broader commercial ecosystem.

This is something we already highlighted in our 2026 Sponsorship Trends Report: sponsorship increasingly needs to be considered as a cross-departmental tool, rather than something owned exclusively by marketing, and herein lies maybe one of the biggest opportunities for sponsorship. Whereas partnerships that create value for marketing only have one business case, cross-departmental partnerships have a very different (and far more valuable) business case.

This makes B2B sponsorships so interesting. The addressable audience may be smaller, but the potential value per relationship can be significantly higher.

The measurement question becomes unavoidable

Of course, this also creates a problem in the current sponsorship market.

The broader the objectives, the more difficult sponsorship becomes to measure. If the only KPI is media exposure, which has often been the case, the evaluation is relatively straightforward. If the objectives include brand perception, customer relationships, employee engagement, sales opportunities and credibility, the measurement framework needs to become much more sophisticated.

Our research has shown that only 28% of Belgian brands currently measure sponsorship in a consistent and thorough way, while difficulty evaluating sponsorship is the number one barrier to greater investment. This is why the shift towards B2B should not simply mean more technology companies putting their logos on football shirts, but it should mean better sponsorship thinking.

It might sound so logical, but we all know this is unfortunately not the case. Objectives need to be clearly defined before the partnership is signed, and the relevant audiences need to be identified. The role of the rights holder needs to be clear, and activation needs to be planned from the beginning. And finally, measurement needs to go beyond media value, a particularly important point very close to our heart at The Missing Link.

The value of a B2B sponsorship may sit in a combination of brand familiarity, consideration, stakeholder engagement, client retention, new business opportunities, employee participation or access to decision makers. And none of these are captured properly by a simple media value report.

So, is B2B changing sponsorship?

We think it is, but perhaps not in the way the question initially suggests.

B2B is not replacing B2C sponsorship. Consumer brands will continue to invest heavily in sport, entertainment and culture, and awareness will remain one of the most important reasons for doing so. What is changing is the definition of sponsorship value.

The emergence of B2B sponsors is a useful signal because these companies have fewer reasons to invest simply for mass visibility. They are forcing the industry to ask better questions about audiences, relevance, credibility, relationships and business impact.

In that sense, B2B may be helping sponsorship finally evolve beyond its traditional model.

The future is unlikely to belong to the brands that simply reach the biggest audience. It will belong to the brands that understand why a particular audience matters, choose the right platform to reach it and create a credible role for themselves within that environment.

For rights holders, that means understanding the business behind the brand rather than simply the logo on the jersey. For brands, it means starting with the business objective rather than starting with the property. For the sponsorship industry as a whole, it means moving from selling exposure towards creating relevance.

Perhaps that is the real shift we are seeing: sponsorship is not becoming B2B, sponsorship is becoming more business-led.