Lünstroth approached the Arminia situation as a positioning problem, not a design problem. The analysis began with the sponsor's perspective: what does the association with Arminia Bielefeld communicate to a sponsor's target audiences — and is there an alternative positioning of the club that would command a different commercial premium?
The insight: the regional loyalty that sponsors dismissed as a geographic limitation was, in fact, a form of audience quality that national consumer brands — particularly in certain categories — should value above reach. A sponsor associating with Hartz IV demographic stereotypes loses. A sponsor associating with a proven loyal, working-class, values-driven community in a mid-size German city gains something that prime-time advertising cannot buy.
The strategic work identified the specific sponsor categories for which Arminia's positioning represented genuine commercial value, and developed the narrative — visual, editorial, and in presentation materials — that made this case to national sponsors before the first conversation.
What Lünstroth contributed: The ability to read a sponsor's commercial logic from the outside, and to reframe a brand story in terms that sponsor categories respond to. This is a form of cultural analysis — understanding what a brand means to different audiences — applied to a commercial negotiation. It is not design work, and it is not something that the club's internal team could produce, because it requires the perspective of someone who has never worked inside the club's own narrative.