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Discover how sports partnerships can help pharma brands build trust, engage audiences and connect with people before they become patients.
I’ve spent my life following sport, and my career working with pharma. If there’s a race, match, tournament or championship on, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll be watching it. For years, those felt like separate parts of my identity: sport as the pastime, healthcare as the profession. Lately, they seem to be converging more and more.
The closer you look, the more obvious the connection becomes: performance, prevention, and an unyielding focus on marginal gains. Sport occupies a unique place in culture because people actively choose to care about it. People may not seek out healthcare content, but they’ll happily spend hours following a team, athlete or competition.
For healthcare brands, that attention creates an opportunity to reach audiences in a context they are already emotionally invested in. Successful sports partnerships can help a pharma brand build trust, show up for them before they become patients, and make clinical ideas feel much more human.
Three companies stood out to me for how they use this opportunity.
1. Sanofi: The need for speed
In 2024, after a rise in meningitis cases following the COVID-19 pandemic, Sanofi launched the Meningitis Flag, co-created with patient groups and para-athletes. The flag appeared on the #59 McLaren at Le Mans the following year, a fitting way to highlight the critical importance of awareness and vaccination, as meningitis is a condition where speed can save lives. This partnership extends behind the scenes as well, with the McLaren Accelerator partnership applying Formula 1-style analytics, strategy, and pit-stop thinking to enhancing manufacturing efficiency.
Why it works: The strongest partnerships are those built on authentic alignment, and speed, precision and continuous improvement are qualities associated with racing, disease prevention and how medicines are developed. That creates a more credible narrative than sponsorship alone.
2. Lilly: Playing the long game
Lilly’s investment in US women’s basketball spans multiple levels of the game, from college programmes to the WNBA with Caitlin Clark. By building a presence across a sport, Lilly has created opportunities to engage with a broad and increasingly diverse community around their health. Experiential marketing activations such as free mammograms at WNBA All-Star Weekend partnered with Black Health Matters demonstrate how fan engagement can be translated into tangible support for underserved communities.
Why it works: Healthcare equity starts with improving access. By meeting people in spaces that they actively choose to engage with, brands help reduce barriers to getting the right information, seeking early screening and access to support.
3. Novo Nordisk: Living proof
Novo Nordisk has repeatedly used sport to show what living with diabetes can look like, rather than just talking about it. Team Novo Nordisk is the world’s first all-diabetes professional cycling team. In motorsport, Novo Nordisk partnered with former Chip Ganassi IndyCar Racing driver Charlie Kimball throughout his career, who became the first licensed driver with diabetes to win a major professional race.
Why it works: Evidence builds confidence, but lived experience often makes messages resonate in a different way, it feels more human – relevant and authentic – two things a brand can’t claim for itself.
Conclusion
Sport gives healthcare brands access to moments people choose to spend time with, often reaching ‘people’ before they become ‘patients’. But the opportunity is not just to look a bit cooler by association – it’s to earn a place in people’s lives.
So, the question is not just how many people saw the partnership or the advertisement, but also did it change what they knew, felt or did? Did it build trust? And did it strengthen the brand against competitors? Those answers rarely sit neatly in campaign metrics. They come from understanding patients, fans and the culture around the sport – ideally before the logo reaches the jersey.
If you’re considering how a sport-pharma partnership could create meaningful value, or looking to evaluate whether an existing one is achieving its objectives, we’d love to continue the conversation.
About the author
- Sarah Cooper
- Senior Associate, STRAT7 Incite
Sarah is an experienced market research manager across both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and a proud winner of the EphMRA MR Excellence Future Leaders Award 2022. She’s passionate about producing high quality, storylined outputs to clients, ensuring delivery on key objectives.
