Roosters' turnaround 'a dream run' for Steggles

Fast forward six months and the picture is very different. The Roosters are in Sunday's NRL grand final, and Steggles' decision to make a leap of faith appears to have paid off, regardless of whether the team wins or loses against St George.

"It's surpassed all our expectations," said Steggles head of marketing, Andrew Hewson.

Mr Hewson said this week that Steggles would proceed with the next two years of its sponsorship; sponsors often have a clause written into a contract allowing them to back out after a year.

Steggles's brand-health scores, such as awareness of the 91-year-old brand, visibility and its association with quality, had risen as a result of the sponsorship, he said.

"It's been a dream run," he said.

Part of the deal of Steggles signing up was a pledge by the Roosters to clamp down on bad behaviour by players and a commitment to enrol in a charities program, Charity Nest, which requires Steggles to donate $1000 and the club $250 to a cluster of charities for every point the Roosters score against the opposition. To date it has raised $409,000 - close to $150,000 above its target and 5? times the paltry amount it would have generated based on last season's performance.

The Roosters' general manager of marketing and commercial, Steve McGee, said it was essential for the club and its main sponsor to "be truly entrenched in the community".

"When we had conversations with them about it we asked if they wanted to set a cap and they said no," he said. "That's quite an incentive for us."

A sponsorship consultant, BrianLevine, the director of Blinc International, said the presence of charities in contracts was becoming more commonplace.

While most sporting bodies will have a charity they are associated with, clubs seeking redemption in the eyes of the community and sponsors are playing the charity card more prominently. After a disastrous period both on and off the field the Canterbury Bulldogs gave their jersey over to the charity Camp Quality, partly because no sponsor would touch them but also to send a signal to their fan base that the club's attitude was changing.

Mr Levine said that as much as sponsors do not like to terminate a sponsorship early, they are increasingly canny.

"In the last five years just about every single contract carries a social misconduct clause, which says that if a club or an individual brings the game into disrepute then they [the sponsor] can terminate the sponsorship, without any financial penalty. They all have them," he said.

Mr Levine estimated that Steggles, which is the biggest poultry company in Australia, with annual sales of $1.64 billion, paid about $850,000 a year for the Roosters' naming rights.

Neither Steggles nor the Roosters would discuss numbers.