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Introduction
Sports sponsorship - marketing and selling commercial rights to sponsors - is an important income source to professional sports organizations (Deloitte, 2014; Nufer and Bühler, 2010). A crucial task of professional sports organizations is to manage these sponsorship-related activities, such as strategy formulation, sponsor acquisition, and day-to-day sponsorship execution.
Professional sports clubs and associations that receive funds from sponsors (henceforth referred to as "sponsees") may often seek external support for their sponsorship activities to increase their sponsorship income. While many sponsees fully or partly outsource sponsorship-related activities to sports marketing agencies, other sponsees, like the German football club Bayern Munich, fully manage their sponsorship activities in-house. Why do sponsees approach this make-or-buy decision differently? In this paper, we seek an answer by exploring the determinants of the sourcing decision from a sponsee's perspective. We apply classical theories of transaction cost economics (TCE), the resource-based view (RBV), and contingency theory (CT). Specifically, we focus on three questions; the first is very central: What factors are likely to influence a sponsee's decision to outsource its sponsorship activities? Which activities are likely to be outsourced? What additional sponsee characteristics are likely to lead to outsourcing their sponsorship-related activities?
Previous research in sponsorship largely focuses on the sponsor's perspective (Cornwell and Maignan, 1998; Walliser, 2003) but there is little research on the management of sponsorship activities from the sport organization's perspective (Berrett and Slack, 2001). Studies of outsourcing of sports marketing concentrate on US college sports (e.g. Bouchet, 2010; Burden and Li, 2005; Lee and Walsh, 2011; Li and Burden, 2002), on minor league baseball (Burden and Li, 2009), and on legal aspects of outsourcing sponsorship activities to external specialists (e.g. Kupfer and Neuß, 2013; Von Appen, 2012).
Li and Burden (2002) investigate the type of marketing operations (mainly the production of media material) that are likely to be outsourced by college athletic programs and the reason they decide to outsource (e.g. to maximize guaranteed revenue). Burden and Li (2005) analyze situational factors that affect the decision to outsource marketing activities. Both papers slightly touch on the sales of sponsorship rights. Dietl and Schweizer (2014) derive six sources of inefficiencies and their underlying drivers in managing sponsorship activities.
Although the papers above do not apply theories of...