The impact of junior sports sponsorship on consumer-based brand equity

Sponsorship is a fast-growing marketing and communications tactic, often used as a brand building tool. Despite its popularity, the credibility of sponsorship has come under question, due primarily to a measurement deficiency (Meenaghan and O'Sullivan, 2013). Academics and practitioners alike are seeking more holistic ways to track and measure the impact of sponsorship on business outcomes such as brand equity. Research to date has focused on sponsorship’s hierarchy of effects to understand what factors it is comprised of and how those factors influence consumer knowledge, perceptions and behaviour. Unlike traditional forms of marketing communications, such as advertising, sponsorship can generate the consumer knowledge effects of image transfer and sponsorship-generated goodwill for a business. These consumer knowledge effects occur through association with popular activities like community events, sports, the arts, causes, individual teams or celebrities (Pappu and Cornwell, 2014). Yet, a number of gaps remain in the literature including if and how the consumer knowledge effects generated by sponsorship have an impact on sponsor brand equity. This research extends knowledge of this area by empirically testing the impact of sponsorship on sponsor brand equity—using Keller’s (1993) notion of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) as a central framework.; Submitted in the fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2017.