Content area
Full text
An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article
Keywords Brand equity, Sponsorship, Information science and documentation, Sports, Marketing, Consumers
Abstract Recent research into consumer responses to sponsorships has examined the role of sponsor-event fit on cognitive and affective responses. However, influences on sponsor-event fit have received little consideration. In this study, a sponsor's brand equity is evaluated as a facilitator of sponsor-event fit. Six sponsors (three high equity/three low equity) were paired with six events. Results of hypothesis testing indicated that sponsors with high brand equity were perceived as more congruent sponsors than sponsors with low brand equity even though the events sponsored were identical. Also, a positive relationship was found between sponsor-event congruence and favorable attitudes toward the sponsor. Results of this study suggest that consumers' attitudes toward sponsors are comprised of associations other than the sponsor-event association. While lesser known brands can use sponsorship as a brand-building vehicle, they may not attain the same level of results as their high equity counterparts.
Introduction
Corporate sponsorship
Corporate sponsorship of sports and other events is one of the fastest growing forms of marketing communications used to reach target audiences. The rate of growth in sponsorship expenditures is greater than for traditional media advertising and sales promotion. Corporate spending on sponsorship worldwide was estimated to grow 12 percent in 2001. The sponsorship industry in North America was estimated to be $9.5 billion in 2001, and worldwide spending on sponsorship $24.4 billion in the same year ("Learn more about sponsorship", 2001). According to the International Events Group (IEG), sporting events are the most popular event type, with an estimated 67 per cent of all sponsorship money invested in sporting events. Traditional communications vehicles such as advertising and sales promotion are faced with the challenges of reaching increasingly fragmented consumer markets and cutting through an overload of messages aimed at consumers (Meenaghan, 1998). Sponsorship is viewed as a means of avoiding this clutter by enabling sponsors to identify and target well-defined audiences in terms of demographics and lifestyles. Linking a brand with an event via sponsorship enables firms to gain consumers' attention and interest by associating with events that are important to them. Despite the increased...