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Introduction
With the advertising campaign “Great Together”, Heineken launched its 2008-sponsorship of Champions League. Consumers around the world had no problem understanding and accepting the message: football and beer belong together. The functional fit (Gwinner and Eaton, 1999) between sponsor and sponsee in this particular sponsorship, based on spectators’ consumption, made “Great Together” a meaningful slogan. However, many sponsorships lack natural fit because sponsor and object are not perceived as congruent (i.e. as going together) on key associations (Simmons and Becker-Olsen 2006). Such incongruent sponsorships benefit from additional communication that “explains” the sponsorship to the market, a strategy known as articulation (Cornwell et al., 2006).
Articulation strategies that communicate fit by focusing on shared associations between the brand and the object can be conceptualized as fit articulation. Sponsors apply different types of fit articulation strategies. For example, the Swizz watchmaker Maurice Lacroix explicitly clarified the link between the brand and its sponsorship object, FC Barcelona:
Maurice Lacroix and FC Barcelona share similar qualities which have resulted in the creation of this remarkable watch. Ambition, quality, creativity and style are the attributes which have led to both organizations enjoying success (www.mauricelacroix.com).
However, many campaigns use figurative language rather than explicit terms to communicate sponsorship fit. Maurice Lacroix also runs advertising campaigns with implicit messages such as “Your time is now. More than a club. More than a watch”. This implied message conclusion is the same as the explicitly stated message above, but it requires that consumers draw the conclusion themselves.
The communication examples above illustrate two alternative modes of communication: closed-ended and open-ended, also referred to as conclusion explicitness (Martin et al., 2003). Theory on conclusion explicitness has been used to understand persuasiveness of stated vs implied conclusions in advertising (Chebat et al., 2001). Whereas closed-ended advertising states the conclusion through direct message claims, open-ended advertising contains implied message conclusions. With this distinction, the current paper suggests that fit articulation in sponsorship communication can be closed-ended or open-ended. Thus, the fit between sponsor and object can be articulated explicitly through the provision of clear arguments explaining points of similarity (i.e. closed-ended fit articulation), or implicitly, by using indirect message claims that imply shared associations (i.e. open-ended fit articulation).
Theory of conclusion explicitness...