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1. Introduction
Globalization as a topic of investigation has long been one of the dominating academic trends in social science, and sport marketing has not been immune from this trend. However, academic attention devoted to the better understanding of sport sponsorship as a form of global marketing has been rather negligible ([2] Amis and Cornwell, 2005; [43] Santomier, 2008). The matter of "whom to sponsor" in a global market still remains a challenging practical and academic question. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to identify the decision-making factors affecting sport sponsorship in a of global market context. The research question developed for this study asked when a global corporation is given an opportunity to sponsor one particular professional sport team outside of its domestic market, what factors do decision makers identify and consider as most important before selecting a sponsorship partner? One important assumption of this study is that corporate sponsors have enough financial resources and manpower. That is, the corporation must be ready to employ the sport sponsorship, and, thus the remaining question is only a matter of whom to sponsor. To examine this research question, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a mathematical tool specialized in decision science, will be used to present the best decision-making model.
In academia, one of the interesting issues of sport sponsorship is that, sometimes, corporate sponsors tend to make sport sponsorship decisions without specific professional aims ([49] Tomasini et al. , 2004), and some corporations have failed to execute professional and strategic sponsorship activities ([7] Chadwick and Thwaites, 2004). As such, it is necessary to apply a systematic approach to the understanding and implementation of sport sponsorship. Given the fact that corporate sponsors are investing huge amounts of dollars and effort on sport sponsorship, the corporate sponsors should have a clear objective for sport sponsorship in order to maximize the value of it. A great deal of research in the field of sport sponsorship has made significant contributions to the body of literature, and one of the most common areas in the field is an investigation of corporate sponsorship objectives. For example, there are studies that have examined the motivations for corporate Olympic sponsorship ([3] Apostolopoulou and Papadimitriou, 2004; [21] Kang and Stotlar, 2011) and the World...