Content area
Full text
Roger Bennett: Department of Business Studies, London Guildhall University, London, UK
Introduction
Sponsorship is an important tool of marketing communication that seeks to achieve favourable publicity for a company and/or its brands within a certain target audience via the support of an activity not directly linked to the company's normal business. It is an indirect form of promotion: the company or brand name is incidental to the event being watched or the person supported by the sponsoring firm. A large amount of sponsorship aims to project the sponsor's corporate image to an audience, rather than attempting to relate a brand's unique attributes to the known characteristics of target groups, essentially because many brands are today so similar to those of competing businesses that corporate brand identity is often the major factor that distinguishes a particular brand. Sponsorship differs from patronage in that whereas the latter involves financial or material donations made altruistically and without any expectation of returns through extra advertising or publicity for the benefactor; sponsorship demands short- or long-term contributions to the commercial success of the sponsoring firm (ISBA, 1982; Meenaghan, 1983, 1991a). Sponsorship might be undertaken to improve a company's sales (Marshall and Cook, 1992; Varadarajan and Menon, 1988), to build a corporate image (Marshall and Cook, 1992; Simkins, 1980), to reach a narrow section of people (Freeman and Walley, 1988), or to achieve multiple objectives (Abratt et al., 1987; Irwin and Asimokopoulos, 1992; Meenaghan, 1983). It might also help a company attract and retain high calibre employees, as it can project corporate images which imply close involvement with activities valued by current and potential workers (Allen, 1990; Gardner and Schuman, 1987; Shimp, 1993). A number of studies have concluded that sponsorship can be a highly cost-effective method of marketing communication (Marshall and Cook, 1992; Meenaghan, 1991b; Thwaites, 1995). For example, Miles (1995) reported that responses to promotional materials issued by the Visa credit card organisation and featuring its sponsorship of the Olympic Games were 17 per cent higher than for a control group to which Olympic sponsorship images were not transmitted. Also card usage was observed to increase by an average 21 per cent during promotions based on major sponsorships. Mintel (1990) found that unprompted awareness of the name of an...