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International Sports Marketing
Edited by Vanessa Ratten and Hamish Ratten
Introduction
It is nearly impossible to attend a major event without seeing hordes of sponsors vying for buyers' attention and, more and more, corporations are turning to sponsorships to reach prospective customers ([12] Catherwood and Vankirk, 1992; [28] Dallenbach et al. , 2006; [105] Wakefield et al. , 2007). One estimate suggests that companies spend 22 percent of their marketing communications budget to target prospects through sponsorship ([99] Sneath et al. , 2006) and 96 percent of US corporations use sponsorship to augment their marketing communications ([17] Close et al. , 2006). Over the last 25 years, investments into sponsorships worldwide have grown from US$0.5 billion in 1982 to US$37 billion by 2006 ([53] International Events Group, 2007), and sponsorships are now one of the fastest growing marketing communications vehicles in the world ([27] Cunningham et al. , 2009).
The shift of marketing resources to sponsorships is a reflection of the decreasing effectiveness of traditional media ([109] Wohlfeil and Whelan, 2006) resulting from the increased fragmentation of media markets and a corresponding clutter in advertising messages ([96] Shimp, 1997; [67] Madrigal, 2001; [90] Quester and Thompson, 2001; [93] Roy and Cornwell, 2003). In addition, the costs to advertise in traditional media have increased ([46] Gwinner, 1997). To avoid the ubiquitous noise of advertisements, marketers have moved more of their marketing resources into sponsorships to allow targeting of specific groups ([65] McDaniel, 1999; [74] Meenaghan, 2001b; [38] Fan and Pfitzenmaier, 2002; [94] Roy and Cornwell, 2004; [98] Smith, 2004; [14] Chedi, 2008), and to engage these groups in interactive conversations ([36] Evans et al. , 2004; [109] Wohlfeil and Whelan, 2006). Moreover, managers are finding that sponsorships are a more efficient means of communicating with buyers ([72] Meenaghan, 1998; [62] Lyberger and Mccarthy, 2001). More importantly, by providing sponsorship support, a firm can expect that the positive buyer feelings held toward the sponsored property[1] will transfer to the sponsor ([70] Meenaghan, 1991; [46] Gwinner, 1997; [65] McDaniel, 1999; [110] Woodside et al. , 2006). As such, the goal of the sponsorship for a B2B firm is to communicate the brand benefits to the members of the prospective customer's buying center. In this paper, we use...