Sponsorship and Brand Equity Literature Review

Sponsorship is believed to be one of the most essential instruments that can shape a firm’s marketing communication mix, often distinguished from more traditional marketing media (Meenaghan, 1996). In order to lay the ground for later studies, Meenaghan (1983, p.9) defined sponsorship as “the provision of assistance either financial or in-kind to an activity by a commercial organization for the purpose of achieving commercial objectives”. Sport sponsorship is a common form of sponsorship. In sports sponsorship, sponsors reach out to financially support a sports event or a sports team in return for favorable opinions and attitudes towards the sponsor’s brand from the target audiences, who are fans of that specific game or team.

Sponsorship attains the highest possible effect when it is an integrated part of communication strategy (Cornwell et al., 2005; Walliser, 2003). In most cases, the two main goals of sports sponsorship are to increase brand awareness and to improve or alter brand image by associating with existing positive attitude towards the events or teams in fans’ favor (Gwinner, 1997; Keller, 2003). In other word, Crompton (2004) expressed the main marketing objective of most sponsorships is to create of customer-based brand equity. This finding is also in the same line of thought with Keller (2003) and Christensen (2006). Aaker (1996, p.7) referred to brand equity as “a set of assets and liabilities link to a brand’s name and symbols that adds to or subtracts from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customer. The major asset categories are: brand name awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality and brand associations.” Managers aim to deploy sponsorship as an approaching tool to desired values offered by sponsor opportunities (Farrelly et al. 2006).

Regarding different levels of brand equity outcomes, Cornwell et al. (2005) explained the sponsorship processing by consumers in 3 steps: cognitive (gaining brand...