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ABSTRACT
This article offers a framework for understanding the effects of commercial sponsorship on consumers. It defines and explores certain tenets essential to understanding sponsorship effects, namely, goodwill, image transfer, and the concept of fan involvement, and relates these tenets to the achievement of a consumer response, building to a proposed model of how sponsorship "works" in relation to consumers. (c) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Commercial sponsorship represents one of the most rapidly growing areas of marketing activity today. Although examples of corporate sponsorship were evident in many economies over 100 years ago, the scale was small, the incidence rare, and the motives often a mixture of patronage and personal fulfillment by corporate owners as patrons. However, the last three decades have seen the development of a more concerted commercial version of sponsorship, which is increasingly pragmatic in business terms, greater in scale, and globally practiced (Meenaghan, 1998a). Largely used today by corporations as a method of marketing communications, the scale and recent growth in commercial sponsorship is shown by the fact that sponsorship expenditure in the United Kingdom increased from L4 million in 1970 (Buckley, 1980) to $1075 million in 1997 (Sponsorship Research International, 2000). In the U.S. market, corporate investment in sponsorship has grown from $850 million in 1985 to an estimated 2000 expenditure of $8.7 billion (International Event Group, 2000), while sponsorship expenditure worldwide increased from $2 billion in 1984 to $23.16 billion in 1999 (Sponsorship Research International, 2000). These data of sponsorship expenditure only include the direct costs of securing the property rights to sponsorthe activity. It is commonly agreed that a sum at least equivalent to the direct costs must be expended in leveraging/exploiting the sponsorship rights purchased.
The current scale of investment in sponsorship is substantial, as is the growth in its relative importance as a method of marketing communications, clearly evidenced by the following facts:
* On a worldwide basis, sponsorship as a percentage of advertising expenditure increased from 2.5 to 3% in 1987 (Otker &Hayes, 1987) to 7.0% in 1999; in countries such as France and Italy, it is currently valued at 9.5 and 13.2%, respectively (Sponsorship Research International, 2000). The growth dynamic of sponsorship is further indicated by the fact that it has...