Employer Branding: Preliminary Thinking on the Role of Corporate Sponsorship

Corporate sponsorship of sports, arts and causes has been seen as a consumer communications platform for decades but has only more recently been valued as an internal marketing tool oriented toward employees. It is argued here that corporate sponsorship can also play a role in employer branding for potential employees. As pieces of information about a company, the sponsorships a company holds may play a role in communicating about the psychological and functional benefits of employment. Preliminary findings from a pilot study and first study are presented. While the ordering of information about a company (company-sport, sport-company) and its sponsorship of sport did not influence employer attractiveness, supplying an articulating statement did. Participants viewing webpages of the company and sponsored sport and reading a linking statement that signaled the social orientation of the company and sport found the company to be more socially oriented. On the other hand, reading an innovative linking statement did not change perceptions of the employer given the same materials.