15.5 The Olympics and the Marketing of Sports: Sponsorship

Few contemporary marketing strategies have grown more rapidly than corporate sport sponsorship as evidenced by sponsorship expenditures tripling in the past ten years. The proliferation of sponsorship opportunities, coupled with recessionary economic conditions, has required sponsoring companies to emphasize strategic market planning processes including the establishment of specific sponsorship objectives measuring impact on business. Kuzma, Shanklin & McCally (1993) advocated that a sponsorship arrangement will be consummated only when what the sponsorship offers, or the sponsorship inventory, matches what the prospective sponsor seeks to achieve. Unfortunately, previous inquiries failed to explore relationships between these variables which, therefore, became the purpose of the current exploratory study of active corporate sponsors (N = 78). Regression analysis (p<.05) revealed significant relationships to exist between distinctive objectives and inventory criteria which provides sport sponsorship organizers an empirically-based benchmark for customizing proposals containing criteria directly related to the fulfillment of prospective sponsors desired outcomes.