Sponsorship-linked Marketing: Opening the Black Box

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, individualand 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. Research on sponsorship-linked marketing spans several literatures, including the marketing subdiscipline areas of advertising, consumer behavior, and strategy, as well as sports management, human movement sciences, and the social sciences. Sponsorship of sports, causes, the arts, and events forms a major portion of the so-called unmeasured media spending for many firms. Unmeasured media is the catchall category for the various other promotional expenditures of firms and nonprofits outside the major media such as television, radio, print, and outdoor advertising (e.g., billboards, transit cards). Moreover, sponsorship spending (estimated to reach $28 billion worldwide in 2004; IEG 2003) for some firms is now the "tail that wags the dog," with more and more advertising (measured media) being thematically tied to sponsorship investments. Despite broad-based acceptance and dependence on sponsorship-linked marketing programs as a communications tool, little is known about how individuals process these fragments of information (Pham and Vanhuele 1997). Following a review of corporate sponsorship literature, Cornwell and Maignan (1998) and Cornwell (1999) criticized research in this area for lacking explanatory theoretical frameworks of how sponsorship works in the minds of consumers. Since then, a number of theoretically grounded studies of corporate sponsorship have been published, but the black box of sponsorship information processing is only just being opened. With T. Bettina Cornwell (Ph.D., University of Texas) is a professor of marketing in the UQ Business School at the University of Queensland, Australia. Clinton S. Weeks (B.A. Hons., University of Queensland, Australia) is currently in che UQ Business School and the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. Donald P. Roy (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is an assistant professor of marketing at Middle Tennessee State University. this in mind, this paper has three goals. The first is to provide a meaningful summary of theoretical progress to date regarding how consumer-focused sponsorship works. The aim here is not to provide a comprehensive review of all recent sponsorship research but to focus specifically on those papers forwarding theoretically grounded research. The second goal is to critically examine this research, with an emphasis on psychological processing and measurement. Finally, it is the goal of this paper to integrate disparate research into a theoretical framework to guide future research and to assist in the management of sponsorship outcomes.