A Tale of Two Sponsors: Comparing Channels of Sponsorship Effectiveness Using a Local Charity-linked Event

Abstract

The current study uses a local, charity-linked running event that attracts attendants with different motivations to participate and attitudes toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) to examine the effectiveness of sponsorship decisions for two primary, concurrent sponsors. Using a structural equation model for each sponsor, we find that the importance attached to various channels that influence sponsorship effectiveness to be sponsor specific. For the luxury automobile sponsor in our study, an attendant's motivation to participate is the only statistically significant and direct path to intention to purchase. Furthermore, while CSR also links to fit, the fit has no direct path to intention to purchase. This finding could potentially indicate that participants view the luxury automobile sponsorship as a positive expression of CSR, rather than through the event's lens. This finding implies that the luxury automobile dealer's sponsorship gains are not dependent on the event but the cause's support. In contrast, the sponsorship gains for the sports retailer are dependent on the event, where event satisfaction, event leverage, and event fit all have indirect paths to intention to purchase. Additionally, motivation to participate and the importance of CSR operates through different, indirect paths to intention to purchase for the sports retailer. While motivation to participate positively impacts event satisfaction and event satisfaction positively influences intention to purchase, CSR's importance operates through fit,which positively impacts intention to purchase. Our results for the sports retailer indicate an increased fit with the event enhances the sponsor's perceptions as socially responsible and enhances the intentions to purchase the sponsor's goods. Furthermore, a well-liked event increases the likelihood a participant will purchase the sports retailer's products

Exploring the Preference of Corporations for Sponsorship Motives and the Impact of Sponsorship Motives on Sponsoring Intention in Post-Epidemic Era: Using Two Different Approaches—FPR and SEM

“…Essentially, to achieve objectives or effectiveness can be explained as the critical reasons for sponsoring or the motivation of corporations to sponsor. A group of scholars argued that corporations favoring sponsorship projects or events lie in intending to procure their specific objectives, including increasing corporate image and brand promotion, enhancing corporate awareness and corporate perception, strengthening the attention of the public, enlarging market share of products or services and reaching target market, blocking competition, fulfilling the accomplishment of sponsoring, building support and development relations, reinforcing employee relations and motivation, and raising involvement with the local community [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. It can be seen that these sponsorship objectives almost involve five areas of motives, including corporate image, marketing instrument, media exposure, accomplishment, and obtaining partiality.…”

Participant or spectator? Comprehending the sport sponsorship process from different perspectives

“…Although results from the participant sport sponsorship literature incidentally reflect those from the work on spectator sport, it has been proposed that various contrasts exist between the factors that foresee the reason individuals take part in sport vs spectating sport (Lera-L opez and R apun-G arate, 2011). Few studies have been conducted on the efficiency of sport sponsorships from the viewpoint of participants, and those that have emerged just in the last few years are of a restricted scope (Smith et al, 2022;Fechner et al, 2021). Acknowledging this research gap, the current research moves from spectator-driven to participant-driven marketing, by exploring the discrepancies between how participants and spectators anticipate sponsorship.…”