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Interference effects in competitive sponsorship clutter: BOEUF et al.
Abstract
This article examines the effects on consumers’ attitudes of the concurrent exposure of competitive brands sponsoring different properties during an event (i.e., sponsoring an event vs. the athletes participating in this event), thus creating a competitive sponsorship clutter. In contrast with previous research having examined interference effects in advertising, the results of this research reveal that in a sponsorship setting, clutter effects on consumer responses depend on perceived sponsor–sponsee congruence and do not result from deeper information processing. More precisely, it was found that whereas the evaluation of a congruent sponsoring brand is negatively affected by clutter, the impact of clutter on attitude toward an incongruent sponsor is positive. In addition, articulating the sponsorship was shown to decrease the negative effects of clutter. Implications for research and practice are derived from these findings.
... This study addresses these concerns by investigating two factors, such as sponsor-brand authenticity (consumer-brand factor) and sponsor-club brand congruence (consumer-property factor), which play central roles in sponsorship effectiveness. Faced with everincreasing sponsorship clutter (Boeuf et al., 2018), sometimes with real claims and often with exaggerated promises, consumers look for genuine and trustworthy brands (Morhart et al., 2015). This need for authenticity is not only real and practical, it also resonates with Cornwell's (2019) recent claim that sponsor-brand authenticity is the cornerstone of sponsorship engagement. ...
This research examines the influence of brand community identification (BCI) on three measures of sponsorship effectiveness—brand advocacy, purchase intention, and sponsor‐brand choice. Additionally, we investigate the psychological mechanism and the moderators between BCI and sponsorship outcomes. We collected data from members of two brand communities, across four experiments (2 × 2 between‐subject designs), during soccer league events. Our findings demonstrate that BCI increased brand advocacy and purchase intention. It shows a novel psychological mechanism (brand community engagement) between BCI and brand advocacy; both brand authenticity and sponsor–club congruence serve as boundary conditions. Counter‐intuitively, our study revealed that both high‐congruent and low‐congruent sponsor brands could be effective, depending on consumers' identification with the brand community. Our research makes several meaningful theoretical and practical contributions. Sports clubs and sponsors must cultivate consumers' identification with the club's brand community, which offers two‐fold benefits; it leads to greater effectiveness, measured in terms of club brand engagement and sponsor‐brand advocacy. Moreover, our research demonstrates that consumers, regardless of their identification with the brand community, will stop supporting a sponsor brand if they perceive it as less authentic.
... The concept of congruence is fundamental in understanding how sponsorship works [26]. According to [27], congruence occurs when there is a logical mental association between a sponsor and the sponsored event [28], whether this is due to shared functional attributes or because they have a similar image [29,30]. When consumers evaluate different objects, the perceived congruence between them will influence or modify their attitudes to them [22]; that is, when the image of an event and a sponsor brand are congruent, mental images are triggered that are held in memory and later associated with the sponsor brand and in the final instance, with purchase intentions [28,31]. ...
Emerging online marketing strategies are an opportunity for the sport sponsorship industry as a way of complementing traditional methods. However, in-depth attention has not been given to the study of congruence effects on the effectiveness of sponsorship of sport event websites, and specifically to study the role and effects of sponsor logos. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the congruence effect of sponsor brands featured on the website of a sports event on sponsorship effectiveness in visual, attitude-related and behavioural terms, using an eye-tracker to monitor memory activation and changes in attitudes and intentions. In study 1, the role of congruence on website sponsorship was analysed, using real brands sponsoring the ninth edition of the "Mallorca 312" Cycletourist Tour (42 participants). In study 2, the congruence of fictitious brands was analysed on the effects of website sponsorship of the 37th edition of the MAPFRE (competitions brand name) Copa del Rey regatta (101 participants). Congruence is preferable to incongruence in sponsor brands, except when the sponsorship aims to boost a recall of new market brands. The results validate the importance of managing congruence levels in the online sponsorship of sports events due to the influence on sponsorship effectiveness and its impact on cognitive processing.
The current research broadens the scope of sponsorship research to empirically examine ambivalence as a consumer response to the increasingly popular strategy of brands engaging in the simultaneous sponsorship of rival teams (i.e., a joint sponsorship). Specifically, our research considers the effects of ambivalence and team identification on sponsorship responses across three different types of brand-team partnerships: a joint sponsorship of two rival teams, a favored team sponsorship, and a rival team sponsorship. Our results indicate that a joint sponsorship elicits ambivalence which directly and indirectly has a negative impact on attitudes and intentions toward the sponsoring brand. Joint sponsorships were also found to diminish the well-established link between team identification and attitudes and intentions. Our research also identified argument strength as a brand messaging strategy for mitigating some of the negative effects of simultaneously sponsoring rival properties.
As sport properties and brands leverage the use of hashtags to expand their share of voice and audiences, they also face a host of emerging legal issues at the nexus of social media and intellectual property laws. This article examines the current potential conflict between the courts and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) regarding the legal status of hashtags as trademarks, which provides the backdrop discussion of sport properties’ approaches to potentially infringing use of hashtags in the context of ambush marketing. The Federal Trade Commission has also initiated regulatory efforts aimed at hashtag-based promotions. Analysis of significant cases and application of a typology of hashtags to sport industry examples provides guidance to sport organizations. While typically favoring strict enforcement in matters involving intellectual property, the risk in stifling conversations stimulated by hashtags may call for more innovative tactics to achieve brand protection and consumer protec...
has been recently suggested that sponsor identification may be kissed in favor of prominent brands. All things equal, consumers are more likely to attribute sponsorship to brands that they perceive to be more prominent in the marketplace, such as large-share brands. This article offers additional empirical evidence for this phenomenon and examines the underlying processes. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment replicate the phenomenon and show that this bias arises only when consumers are unable to retrieve the name of the sponsor directly from memory. In other words, direct retrieval is the default process of sponsor identification. The prominence bias is therefore more likely to occur in cluttered media environments where learning the event-sponsor associations is difficult. The findings further suggest that this bias emanates from a relatively controlled hypothesis-testing process that combines retrieval and constructive processes. During identification, the prominence of the brand is used as a confirmation cue that either validates or conflicts with people's vague recollections. The results also indicate that prominent brands identified or misidentified as sponsors do in fact benefit from enhanced brand image. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
This study investigates the regulation and restriction of ambush marketing during the London 2012 Olympic Games, with analysis of actions taken via social networks and digital marketing related to the mega sports event. Results show that, where this issue was concerned, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) was the most restrictive OCOG in history. However, there are neither specific legal tools nor international agreements to prohibit ambush marketing and protect official sponsorships. This paper looks at the proliferation of ambush cases during the London 2012 Olympics and underlines the widespread growth of this practice, despite reinforcement of existing laws. Findings show that brands were very imaginative at the expense of official sponsors and that social networks can be powerful publicity channels.
The level of congruity is determined by the degree of match or mismatch between an object and its associated attribute. Product evaluations are positively influenced when there is moderate incongruity between a product and its association; this finding is termed the moderate schema incongruity effect (Mandler 1982). The purpose of the current study was to investigate the influence of incongruity between a product and one of its extrinsic cues on consumers' product evaluations. Furthermore, we examined the moderating role of consumers' level of product knowledge. Incongruity was created by partnering a product with a sponsor. We found that consumers who were highly knowledgeable of the product gave the highest taste evaluations to the moderately incongruent product–sponsor pairing, whereas taste evaluations for consumers with low product knowledge did not differ across product–sponsor pairings. The results of our study have important practical implications for marketers, namely that product–sponsor fit can enhance consumers' consumption experiences.
The fact of having already encountered something encourages future preference, a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect (MEE). There is a widely accepted view that recognition inhibits the MEE. Here this view is contested and the generality of the findings upon which it is based questioned. New evidence is presented from a systematic investigation of the moderating influence of recognition memory on the MEE, using brand logo stimuli and methods that make the results directly applicable to marketing practice. It is shown that recognition, whether correct or mistaken, enhances, rather than inhibits, the likelihood of preference.
Marketing communications that utilize partnerships between a brand or corporation and a sport, art, or community activity are thoroughly integrated into our understanding of business behavior. Despite the ubiquity of sponsorship relationships as the bases of communication platforms, we still do not understand fully how they work when successful, and how they do not work when they fail. Memory is important to the communication function of all sponsorships and a strategic objective of many. Thus, we explore memory for sponsorship relationships. The aim is to codify our progress to date in measuring memory-related sponsorship outcomes, to identify where shortcomings in our understanding remain and to move toward more complete and explanatory models of sponsorship effects. Topics discussed include: memory as a measure of sponsorship success, strong and weak memory objectives, implicit and explicit memory, interference from competitors, strategic encoding processes, cueing memory retrieval, redefining memories, and enhancing memory for sponsorship relationships.
Purpose
– The study presented in this article aims to examine the impact of the leveraging of three distinct ambush marketing strategies that are under-researched in the literature: Promotion, Event, and Broadcast.
Design/methodology/approach
– An experiment was conducted where the type of ambush strategy was manipulated (i.e. Promotion, Event, Broadcast, no ambush) as well as the market dominance of the sponsor (i.e. dominant or non-dominant) and the congruence level between the event and the sponsor (i.e. high or low congruence).
Findings
– Ambush strategies' impacts differ widely. The Broadcast strategy is the most harmful to the identification of the actual sponsor; the Event strategy favors the identification of the pseudo-sponsor as the sponsor, while the Promotion strategy is both harmful to the actual sponsor and beneficial for the pseudo-sponsor. Furthermore, although dominant brands benefit more from their sponsorships, they are more affected by an ambush than non-dominant brands.
Research limitations/implications
– Only one sponsor and one pseudo-sponsor were considered at a time. In addition, digital media were not investigated as vectors of ambush marketing. Further research where multiple sponsors and pseudo-sponsors are leveraging their associations to an event, using both off and on-line media, needs to be undertaken.
Practical implications
– Against the Promotion strategy sponsors need to create not only strong but also unique associations with the event. The Event strategy can be circumvented with preemptive smaller scale events. Exclusive access to the program broadcast for event sponsors can protect against pseudo-sponsors.
Originality/value
– This study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of the Promotion, Event, and Broadcast strategies. Previous studies had focused almost exclusively on another strategy: the airing of commercials by pseudo-sponsors during event broadcast against which most sponsors are now effectively protected.
Event sponsorship has become a multibillion dollar industry (Levin, 1993), yet little theory-driven research exists exploring sponsorship effects (Cunningham & Taylor, 1994). Keller (1993) noted that customer-based brand equity is the appropriate goal of all elements of the marketing mix, including promotions such as sponsorship. The effectiveness of these promotions may be observed through what Keller terms "direct measures pitting known brands against unknown or fictitious brands." This study uses an experimental design employing attitude-toward-the-ad (AAD) as a direct measure of sponsorship support, advertising's impact on attitude-toward-the-brand (AB), and purchase intention (PI) for official sponsors and ambush marketers in the fast food and credit card product categories of the 1994 Winter Olympic Games. Ambush marketers are those companies that use advertising to make it appear as if they are associated with the Games without purchasing official sponsorship rights (Sandler & Shani, 1989). Based on these results, there appeared to be no competitive advantage for official sponsors in terms of AAD's influence on PI. These Findings suggest that leveraging a sponsorship with advertising does not always ensure competitive advantage in terms of building customer-based brand equity.
Although consumers often encounter ads for familiar brands, previous advertising interference studies have used ads for low-familiarity brands. The authors focus on brand familiarity's role in increasing ad memorability and moderating competitive interference. They conducted a factorial experiment varying the familiarity of brands featured in test and competing ads. With differences in ad executions, prior exposure, processing objectives, and exposure time experimentally controlled, subjects displayed substantially better recall of new product information for familiar brands. Their findings suggest that established brands have important advantages in advertising: Consumers should be more likely to recall ad information, and their memory should be less affected by exposure to competitors' ads. The authors conclude with implications for the marketing of new and mature brands.
This study focuses on the accurate identification of corporate sponsors among consumers attending a NASCAR event. The results of this study support prior experimental work (e.g., Johar and Pham 1999), indicating that consumers are more likely to correctly identify prominent and related sponsors. Importantly, the findings indicate that a reason for such recall is that the best-performing properties attract prominent and related sponsors, and affective intensity (either strong positive or negative feelings) toward a property activates or enhances the cognitive processing by consumers of sponsors of highly competitive properties.
Although most events are sponsored by more than one firm, the impact of roster size, or number of sponsors, on sponsorship effectiveness has received scant research attention. Two studies investigate the hypothesized moderating effect of roster size on consumer evaluations of events. Study 1 shows that compared with one-sponsor conditions, an increased number of sponsors dilutes the benefits obtained from consumers inferring a goodwill sponsorship motive and enhances attitudes under sales motives conditions. Study 2 shows that compared with one-sponsor conditions, an additional sponsor reduces the negative effect of being associated with stigmatized event beneficiaries. The results have implications for sponsorship theory, as well as practical implications for event promoters and the firms they seek to attract as sponsors.
Abstract Studies have shown that the fit between a sponsoring
brand and the sport, art, or charity sponsored influences
outcomes such as brand awareness and image. This research
adds the role of sponsor–sponsee similarity to the discussion
of fit. The authors argue that similarity interacts with fit when
conditions evoke suspicion or disrupt typical inferences regarding
sponsorship relationships. Interaction is particularly
important when the sponsor seeks to develop its image by
association with a cause, and is also of consequence for the
cause in terms of its branding. Three studies test sponsorship
effects with respect to blood donation and cancer prevention
organizations. Results support the predicted moderated mediation
model, showing that similarity between a corporate
sponsor and a sponsored cause can interact with fit, influencing
sponsorship evaluations directly and shaping attitudes and
behavioral intentions toward constituents indirectly. This
work reveals a counterintuitive effect of similarity for some
sponsorship relationships.
The fit between a sponsor and object (i.e., sponsored organization, cause, event, or individual) has been shown to be an important construct in predicting sponsorship effects, but little research has been done to understand the basis for fit perceptions. The current research uses three studies to find and test the underlying dimensions used to judge the degree of overall fit between a sponsor and object. Starting with an exploratory study that uses qualitative cognitive mapping to uncover seven dimensions that form the basis for overall fit perceptions, a follow-up experiment determines their ability to predict overall fit and sponsorship-related attitude changes. The last study tests whether overall fit perceptions can be manipulated both positively and negatively with fit dimension—related communications about the sponsorship. The research finds that sponsor product relevance, attitude similarity, geographic similarity, audience similarity, and sponsorship duration significantly predict overall fit and/or can be used to manipulate fit perceptions positively.
Using a latent growth modeling (LGM) approach, this study examines the controversial role of perceived sponsor–event fit in inducing changes in brand affect. On the basis of two longitudinal studies related to the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2012 London Olympics, the authors determine that fit and brand affect increase linearly over time. Resolving an apparent conflict in the marketing literature, the results show that the initial level of fit relates positively to the initial level of brand affect, but relates negatively to the subsequent increase in brand affect. Moreover, a significant and positive association emerges between the change trajectories, such that a steeper increase in perceived fit results in a faster rate of brand affect improvement. Furthermore, the initial level of brand affect is associated with subsequent increases in neither brand affect nor fit. Therefore, incongruence resolution is key to ensuring that sponsorship improves brand affect. Finally, both attitude toward the sponsorship and event involvement have positive impacts on subsequent increases in both brand affect and perceived fit.
Managers increasingly seek to develop brand loyalty through sponsorship activities, though this relationship has not been solidly established. This article models and demonstrates the impact of sponsorship on brand loyalty. The studied concepts and relationships emerge from both the sponsorship and consumer-brand relationship literature. The experimental design relies on before and after measurements and multiple exposures to the sponsorship. Thus this study demonstrates that sponsorship exposure has a positive impact on brand affect, brand trust, and brand loyalty. The change in brand loyalty from before to after sponsorship exposure reflects two persuasion processes. First, self-congruity with an event enhances brand loyalty through event and brand affect. Second, perceived fit between the event and the brand has a positive effect on brand affect, through attitude toward the sponsorship, and on brand trust, such that it ultimately influences brand loyalty. Brand affect is identified as an important mediator of sponsorship effects.
Existing literature has found two sources of advertising interference (competitive and contextual) that decrease the effectiveness of an ad in a cluttered environment. However, to date, the negative impact of competitive and contextual interference has been examined independently. This research explores advertising effectiveness when these sources exist concurrently. Contrary to the supposition concerning the additive effects of both sources of interference when simultaneously present, our findings indicate that viewing ads for the same product category with similar executional elements leads to the dissipation of interference effects (Study 1). Consistent with the process rationale, when a product-brand cue (versus a picture cue) is provided, this novel effect disappears (Study 2). The implications of these findings for advertising are highlighted in the discussion section.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive model of high‐level sponsorship effects that works well in both sports and cultural sponsorship contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
The sponsorship model is tested using survey data from target market representative samples in two professional sports contexts and two cultural contexts.
Findings
The model works almost equally well in both contexts. Furthermore, a more parsimonious mediated effects model provides virtually the same results as the full model. Improving attitude towards the sponsorship and object equity are found to be the most important factors for improving sponsor equity. The model also confirms earlier research on the importance of sponsor sincerity and sponsor‐object fit in determining sponsorship effects.
Research limitations/implications
The explained variance of the sincerity and object equity constructs was not as high as for other constructs in the model.
Practical implications
Sponsorship managers should pre‐test potential objects and sponsorship communications to make sure that constructs in the model such as fit, sincerity, sponsorship attitudes, and object equity are maximised to provide optimal sponsor equity.
Originality/value
The model combines constructs from various literatures into a comprehensive model of high‐level sponsorship effects. Furthermore, while most previous sponsorship research has used convenience samples and/or fictional and/or single sponsorship contexts, the comprehensive model tested here is shown to have high external validity by its consistently good performance in predicting sponsorship effects using four real sponsorships and representative samples.
Despite the growing role of sponsorship in the marketing activities of firms worldwide, academic research in this area has been limited. Adopting a classical conditioning framework, this research examines the effects of consumers’ attitudes about a sports event, their perceptions of sponsor-event fit, and their attitudes about the sponsor on a multidimensional measure of sponsorship response. The results suggest that sponsor-event fit, perceived sincerity of the sponsor, perceived ubiquity of the sponsor, and attitude toward the sponsor are key factors in generating a favorable response from sponsorship. Liking of the event and perceived status of the event have differing significance depending on how response is measured. Sponsorevent fit also has interaction effects with perceived status of the event and personal interest in the event. The implications of these findings for sponsors and event managers are examined, and future research directions are outlined.
Purpose
Sport events organizers have recently undertaken to disclose to the general public instances where firms have conspired to ambush the official sponsors. In doing so, they have sought to sensitise audiences to sponsors' valuable contribution. However, what is the effect of such disclosure on ambush marketers' brands? This study aims to answer this question, using an experimental approach.
Design/methodology/approach
Two successive experiments were conducted. The first study used a student sample ( n =120) and a fictitious brand. The second study used a before‐and‐after experiment with control groups ( n =480), using four real brands and print disclosure articles. Data was collected from six French metropolitan areas and analysed using Repeated Measure ANOVA and MANOVA.
Findings
Ambush marketing disclosure is associated with lower attitudes towards the ambusher's brand. Two variables moderate this effect: involvement in the event and attitude towards sponsorship, both of which worsen the negative influence of ambush disclosure on audiences' attitudes.
Research limitations/implications
While the empirical work reflects one national context and one specific sport event, these findings are the first to empirically support the notion that disclosure of ambush practices adversely impacts ambushers' brand.
Practical implications
These results offer official sponsors and event organisers an effective alternative strategy to legal protection, with demonstrated effects on the core target audience of the event.
Originality/value
The literature has alluded to possible perverse effects of ambush marketing. This study is the first to draw an analogy with corrective advertising to test and demonstrate the impact of ambush disclosure on ambushers' brands.
Several suggestions for a class of theories of recognition memory have been proposed during the past decade. These models address predictions about judgments of prior occurrence of an event, not the identification of what it is. The history and current status of one of these models is discussed. The model postulates the detection of familiarity and the utilization of retrieval mechanisms as additive and separate processes. The phenomenal experience of familiarity is assigned to intraevent organizational integrative processes; retrieval depends on interevent elaborative processes. Other current theoretical options are described, and relevant supportive data from the literature are reviewed. New tests of the model involving both free recall and word pair paradigms are presented. The dual process model is extended to the word frequency effect and to the recognition difficulties of amnesic patients. (68 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper considers how the Internet can be used to leverage commercial sponsorships to enhance audience attitudes toward the sponsor. Definitions are offered that distinguish the terms leverage and activation with respect to sponsorship-linked marketing; leveraging encompasses all marketing communications collateral to the sponsorship investment, whereas activation relates to those communications that encourage interaction with the sponsor. Although activation in many instances may be limited to the immediate event-based audience, leveraging sponsorships via sponsors' Web sites enables activation at the mass-media audience level. Results of a Web site navigation experiment demonstrate that activational sponsor Web sites promote more favorable attitudes than do nonactivational Web sites. It is also shown that sponsorsponsee congruence effects generalize to the online environment, and that the effects of sponsorship articulation on audience attitudes are moderated by the commerciality of the explanation for the sponsor-sponsee relationship. Importantly, the study reveals that attitudinal effects associated with variations in leveraging, congruence, and orientation of articulation may be sustained across time. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Celebrities used as endorsers in advertising are often very popular ones. However, from a cognitive point of view (and more academic one), congruence between brand and celebrity seems to be very important too. Based on affective and cognitive theories to explain endorsement efficiency, congruence between brand and celebrity is shown to be at least as effective as celebrity likability. Moreover the predisposition toward the ad and brand beliefs are mediators of the effects of congruence between brand and celebrity and celebrity likability on ad efficiency. oui
Sponsorship of sports, arts, and causes has become a mainstream marketing communications tool. A great deal of fieldwork has attempted to gauge the relative effectiveness of sponsorship in a marketing context, but these weakly controlled field studies contribute little to our understanding of how individuals process sponsorship-linked marketing communications. By considering possible underlying information-processing mechanics, individual- and group-level factors, market factors, and management factors, together with theorized sponsorship outcomes, this paper offers a model of consumer-focused sponsorship-linked marketing communications that summarizes and extends theoretical understanding of the topic.
Purpose
This study seeks to examine the practicality and applications of a customer‐based brand equity model in the Chinese sportswear market.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on Aaker's well‐known conceptual framework of brand equity, this study employed structural equation modeling to investigate the causal relationships among the four dimensions of brand equity and overall brand equity in the sportswear industry. The present study used a sample of 304 actual consumers from China's two largest cities, Beijing and Shanghai.
Findings
The findings conclude that brand association and brand loyalty are influential dimensions of brand equity. Weak support was found for the perceived quality and brand awareness dimensions.
Research limitations/implications
Future research needs to be done if the results are to be expanded into other regional Chinese markets in light of the significant gaps between different regions. Further research also could strengthen this analysis by adding performance measurement into the model.
Practical implications
The paper shows that sportswear brand managers and marketing planners should consider the relative importance of brand equity in their overall brand equity evaluation, and should concentrate their efforts primarily on building brand loyalty and image.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the scant literature testing the applicability of consumer‐based brand equity in the sportswear industry. Since China is the world's fastest‐growing market for sportswear products, this study also provides important insights about the understanding of Chinese consumers' perceptions of overall brand equity and its dimensions.
Although consumers often encounter ads for familiar brands, previous advertising interference studies have used ads for low-familiarity brands. The authors focus on brand familiarity's role in increasing ad memorability and moderating competitive interference. They conducted a factorial experiment varying the familiarity of brands featured in test and competing ads. With differences in ad executions, prior exposure, processing objectives, and exposure time experimentally controlled, subjects displayed substantially better recall of new product information for familiar brands. Their findings suggest that established brands have important advantages in advertising: Consumers should be more likely to recall ad information, and their memory should be less affected by exposure to competitors’ ads. The authors conclude with implications for the marketing of new and mature brands.
Sponsorship is a powerful but often misunderstood form of consumer persuasion. The components of sponsorship's persuasive impact are outlined and illustrated with data on large brands engaged in major sponsorships. Given the measured degree of success, many sponsorships may indeed be little more than management ego trips while others are dramatic successes. A comparison of successful and unsuccessful sponsorships points to basic steps that will improve sponsorship performance.
Sponsorship has been one of the fastest growing marketing platforms in recent decades, yet while marketing expenditures generally are being increasingly subjected to the requirement and discipline of accountability, it would seem that sponsorship practice behaves as if impervious to this changed climate. Considering both the extent to which business fails to measure sponsorship effectiveness at all and where measured, the problematic nature of the metrics employed, it is probably an understatement to conclude that a “measurement deficit” exists in sponsorship. This paper proposes a critique of current practice in the evaluation of sponsorship effectiveness and in particular examines in detail inherent problems arising from the use of the two main metrics currently employed by the industry, “Media Exposure” and “Sponsorship Awareness.” It illustrates the latitude provided by these metrics and the variability of outcomes that can be extracted from their use or in some cases potential abuse. Such latitude in conceptualization and application can extend to having the same sponsorship program receive quite radically different evaluations based on the same raw data. This raises serious questions about the credibility and effectiveness of current sponsorship measurement. The paper further suggests that in order to secure the future of sponsorship and exploit its competitive media advantage, there is a need for the industry to reposition itself in terms of delivering brand experience, engagement, and involvement rather than mere exposure.
Imagine that you are browsing through a magazine, and you see one of your favorite celebrities in an advertisement. Then, a bit further into the magazine you see that same celebrity in an ad for a different product. A few hours later, you think of the celebrity again and try to remember the products s/he was endorsing, but what will you actually recall? This paper examines consumer memory for celebrity advertising under conditions where a single celebrity advertises for more than one brand. Using contextual interference as the theoretical lens, the current research posits and demonstrates how brands in a celebrity's “endorsement portfolio” compete with one another when consumers use the celebrity as retrieval cue for information that was contained in the ads. The findings of the laboratory experiment reveal that brands sharing either a high or low match with the celebrity win the battle during retrieval and inhibit consumers’ ability to accurately recall ad information for brands sharing a more moderate match with the celebrity. The theoretical practical implications of these findings are discussed.
The article discusses the effect of ambush marketing on corporate sponsorship. Ambush marketing reduces the effectiveness of the sponsor's message while undermining the quality and value of the sponsorship opportunity that the event owner is selling. The author stated that the role of sponsorship is a way to gain consumers' attention. Companies use sponsorship to fulfill the primary marketing communications objectives of creating brand awareness and enhancing image, although they explicitly achieve bottom-line sales results.
Virtually all discussions and applications of statistical mediation analysis have been based on the condition that the independent variable is dichotomous or continuous, even though investigators frequently are interested in testing mediation hypotheses involving a multicategorical independent variable (such as two or more experimental conditions relative to a control group). We provide a tutorial illustrating an approach to estimation of and inference about direct, indirect, and total effects in statistical mediation analysis with a multicategorical independent variable. The approach is mathematically equivalent to analysis of (co)variance and reproduces the observed and adjusted group means while also generating effects having simple interpretations. Supplementary material available online includes extensions to this approach and Mplus, SPSS, and SAS code that implements it.
Literature on celebrity endorsements indicates that communications effects are improved when there is a fit, or match-up, between the endorser and the brand. This notion should be particularly relevant to new brands. For established brands, on the other hand, it might actually be more beneficial to select a celebrity endorser with a less than perfect match with the brand. Building on schema congruity theory, this article suggests that selecting a brand-incongruent endorser improves communication effects. Results show that brand-incongruent celebrity endorsers generate longer ad viewing times, higher brand attitudes and brand interest, higher purchase intentions, and more positive word-of-mouth communication.
Only the United States and New Zealand allow direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines. The authors outline the evolution of DTCA in New Zealand and the development of an industry-based self-regulatory system. The authors examine the concerns raised about self-regulation of DTCA, evaluate the evidence related to these, and identify issues that require further attention to strengthen the model currently used. The authors conclude that a self-regulatory approach, complemented by parallel government monitoring, provides an efficient, responsive system for promoting responsible and ethical DTCA.
The corporate social responsibility literature has focused on creating broad associations, such as simply being "socially responsible," and on the simple transfer of positive affect from sponsored causes to sponsoring firms. Both views fail to recognize the power of social initiatives as a means for differentiating among socially responsible firms and, in particular, for reinforcing the brand's positioning. The authors adopt a more traditional branding perspective and show that the fit between a firm's specific associations and a sponsored cause can reinforce or blur the firm's positioning, influence liking for the sponsorship, and bolster or undermine the firm's equity. They also show that communications decisions can mitigate the negative effects of low fit. Finally, they show that sponsorship effects can persist for as long as a year despite day-to-day exposure to other brand communications.
The Olympic Games have become the definitive sports event, with an unparalleled global reach and a remarkably diverse constituency of stakeholders, from the IOC and International Federations to athletes, sponsors and fans. It has been estimated, for example, that 3.6 billion people (about half of the world population) watched at least one minute of the Beijing Games in 2008 on television. The driving force behind the rise of the modern Olympics has been the Olympic marketing programme, which has acted as a catalyst for cooperation between stakeholders and driven the promotion, financial security and stability of the Olympic movement.
This book is the first to explain the principles of Olympic marketing and to demonstrate how they can be applied successfully in all other areas of sports marketing and management. The book outlines a strategic and operational framework based on three types of co-productive relationships (market, network and informal) and explains how this framework can guide professional marketing practice. Containing case studies, summaries, insight boxes and examples of best practice in every chapter, this book is important reading for all students and practitioners working in sports marketing, sports management or Olympic studies.
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415587877/
Research evidence to date suggests that the combined presence of item-specific and relational processing is necessary to induce higher memory performance of the target ad and proper evaluation of the target brand. This elaborative processing, however, requires cognitive capacity. In this paper, an item-specific-relational processing framework was employed to explain the roles of consumer product knowledge in the competitive and non-competitive ad contexts. Findings from an experimental study suggest that high- and low-knowledge consumers differed in product memory and evaluation in competitive and non-competitive ad contexts. Such differences could be explained by consumers' engaging in item-specific and/or relational processing depending on whether target brand information was presented with or without information on competing brands. It appears that competitive ad context would benefit low-knowledge consumers by serving as a reference. In contrast, high-knowledge consumers did not seem to be affected by ad context. Both theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Research in positioning strategy suggests that a product schema, when presented in a moderately incongruent fashion, can evoke a greater degree of positive evaluation than if presented congruently with consumer expectations. This phenomenon has been coined the schema congruity effect. To date, one of the limitations of the phenomenon is that it has been applied almost exclusively to taxonomic stimuli, with little reference to thematic, eventlike stimuli. Two experiments verified that taxonomic and thematic product categories differ with respect to their unique characteristics. Consequently, despite successful replication of the schema congruity effect during taxonomic interpretation, when pushed thematically, the schema congruity effect failed to manifest. Furthermore, both experiments confirmed that, unlike taxonomic product categories that benefit from abstract and moderately incongruent positioning, thematic product categories benefit from concrete and congruent positioning. Implications for understanding the moderating role of thematic positioning on congruity-based product evaluation as well as the differences between taxonomic and thematic stimuli are discussed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A survey as well as an experiment was conducted to study the effects of television brand placement on brand image. The studies showed that the integration of a brand into the editorial content of a program had a significant effect on brand image: As people watched more episodes, the brand image became more in agreement with the program image. These results confirm the applicability of learning and human associative memory theories to brand placement. Another important finding is that brand memory and brand image were not related. Thus, brand image became more positive regardless of viewers' memory of the brand placements, which implies that brand image was implicitly affected. This has important theoretical implications for the understanding of the working of brand placement. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
This study investigates the structural alignment processes in reducing memory interference in a competitive advertising context. In particular, an experimental study is carried out to understand how alignable (i.e., comparable) and nonalignable (i.e., noncomparable) attributes influence ad claim recall at differing levels of competitive ads. Findings indicate that recall of alignable attributes is higher than that of nonalignable attributes in the presence of ads for competing brands. Results from the study also suggest that nonalignable attribute recall decreases as the number of ads featuring competing brands increases from zero to two, whereas alignable attribute recall is not affected by increasing the level of competitive ads. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Congruence has long been discussed in the context of brand extensions and advertising, particularly in terms of celebrity endorsement. Although just as relevant for sponsorship, the examination of this concept in that context is more recent, despite evidence that it plays a significant role in determining the effectiveness of this particular communication technique. In this paper, the authors argue in favor of conceptualizing congruence as a bidimensional construct, consistent with previous research. A scale to capture this important construct is subsequently developed and validated in two separate countries. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Memory for information in an ad can be detrimentally affected by exposure to another ad if the pictures in the two ads are similar. This has been termed contextual interference and has been shown to affect unfamiliar brands featured in an ad. Two studies were conducted to replicate the interference effect on unfamiliar brands and to examine whether familiar brands will be affected. The results replicate the interference effect on unfamiliar brands, demonstrating the robustness of the phenomenon. The results also show that claims about familiar brands are affected, qualifying previous research that shows that familiar brands are relatively impervious to competitive interference. Copyright 2004 by the University of Chicago.
Prior research has viewed competitive interference as undesirable due to its negative effects on brand-attribute recall. We propose that competitive interference is not inherently bad but may be beneficial under certain conditions. In the context of an established brand promoting a new attribute, we show that the new attribute information is interfered with by the brand's old attributes, causing lower retrieval. However, in the presence of competitive advertising, old attribute information is suppressed, and new attribute information is successfully retrieved. Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.