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ABSTRACT
Research into consumer responses to event sponsorships has grown in recent years. However, the effects of consumer knowledge on sponsorship response have received little consideration. Consumers' event knowledge is examined to determine whether experts and novices differ in information processing of sponsorships and whether a sponsor's brand equity influences perceptions of sponsor- event fit. Six sponsors (three high equity/three low equity) were paired with six events. Results of hypothesis testing indicate that experts generate more total thoughts about a sponsor-event combination. Experts and novices do not differ in sponsor-event congruence for high-brand-equity sponsors, but event experts perceive less of a match between sponsor and event for low-brand-equity sponsors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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 grew 14% in 2000 compared with a 10% growth for advertising and a 6% growth for sales promotion. The sponsorship industry in North America has grown from less than $1 billion in 1985 to an estimated $9.5 billion spent in 2001 (International Events Group, 2002). According to the International Events Group (IEG), sports are the most popular event type, with an estimated 69% of all sponsorship money invested in sporting events. Traditional marketing 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, which creates media clutter (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.
The objective of the present study is to extend the emerging body of research on consumer responses to corporate event sponsorships. Recent articles have examined the relationship between consumers' perceptions of the fit between a sponsor and an event and their attitudes toward the sponsor (Gwinner & Eaton, 1999; Johar & Pham, 1999; Speed & Thompson, 2000). However, to date there has been no examination of how consumer knowledge influences processing of sponsorship messages. The present study includes an analysis of consumers' event knowledge and...