Drivers of brand image improvement in sports-event sponsorship

Abstract

This stock-taking article re-examines 20 years of research on conditions that influence the magnitude of brand image improvement through sports-event sponsorship. The study suggests a procedure to adequately measure sponsor image change in field sponsorships and investigates potential factors related to the sponsored property, the sponsorship relationship, the sponsor, and the individual sports spectator that may affect the magnitude of sponsor image improvement. An empirical analysis in the context of a large sponsored sports event shows that some drivers influence sponsor image improvement directly in a multiple regression analysis (spectators’ perceived event image, event–sponsor fit, sponsor familiarity, and product category importance), while other drivers are related to sponsor image in bivariate analyses only (spectators’ event interest, sport interest, event exposure, and demographic characteristics). Reasons for these findings (e.g., interrelationship between drivers of sponsor image improvement), managerial implications, and consequences for the development of a comprehensive model of sponsor image formation are discussed.

Keywords:

• sponsorship
• sponsor image
• sports
• event
• measurement

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Heribert Reisinger, Elisabeth Wolfsteiner, Marion Garaus, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Peter, Churchill, and Brown (1993) alert marketing researchers to potential shortcomings of difference scores, such as potential reliability, discriminant validity, and variance restriction issues. Although most of these issues are of less concern if change/gain scores are used as the dependent variable, the current study also estimates an ANCOVA model using post-event sponsor image (SIpost_ij) as the dependent variable and all drivers plus pre-event sponsor image (SIpre_ij) as the independent variables. The results are similar, except for a non-significant effect of product category importance (PCIMP_ij). This effect probably occurs because product category importance, not surprisingly, shows similarly strong positive bivariate correlations with pre- and post-event sponsor image, while all other significant drivers, also as expected, show a stronger link with post- than pre-event sponsor image (see Table 3).