SPORTS SPONSORSHIP AND BRAND AWARENESS

How the Sports Sponsorship Influence the Brand Awareness?

[Name of the institute]

Abstract

The marketers have been making the most of the sports events to promote their brands and cerate awareness among the consumers, however it is important to determine the extent to which the sports sponsorship influence brand awareness. For this reason, this research take into account NBA to analyse the perception and awareness of the sponsored brands. A focus group study would be undertaken to take responses of the NBA followers. The emphasise will be on deducting their knowledge and recall of the brands that sponsored the favourite teams of consumers in NBA. A group of 10 graduate and undergraduate students will be selected that will comprise of the individuals who follow NBA. The results will be analysed through, transcription, charting and interpretations. This research will enable the marketers to understand how they can better understand the sports marketing and target the required consumer segment more effectively.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION4

Background4

Definition and Purpose of Sponsorship5

Research Purpose6

Research Significance6

Objectives7

Research Questions7

Theoretical Framework7

Research Hypotheses9

Key Definitions and Terms10

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW12

Sports Sponsorship13

Visual Fluency14

Congruence15

Fan Involvement15

Visual Fluency17

Conceptual and Perceptual Fluency17

Familiarity19

Congruence in Sponsorship19

Involvement in the Product Category20

Social Link between Member and Sports Event (NBA)21

NBA Brand Sponsorship Effectiveness- A research by Neurofocus Group22

METHODOLOGY23

Research Design23

Sampling23

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria24

Data Collection24

Data Analysis25

References28

Appendices35

Focus Group Interview Questions35

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Background

The trend of sponsoring the sports events has become a charming method of creating brand awareness among the consumers for a couple of years.

Interest is growing in sponsorship as companies with researchers in management science. This growth can be explained by the globalization of markets and communication networks, commoditization of products, the primacy the brand equity and the plethora of advertisements for consumer increasingly sophisticated (Derbaix et al., 1994). Companies must develop new methods to seduce their targets. Sponsorship has the advantage of exploiting interest's socio-cultural audiences. In 2004, the global market for sponsorship is more than 30 billion and is expected to surpass the 45 billion euros in 2006, according to the study Sponsor Click performed with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).

The share of Sports sponsorship is predominant (27.3 billion euros) because sport is field of major concern in most countries, such as the figures of audience sporting events (e.g. France, the 5 largest television audiences in 2004 were carried out by retransmissions football game). We focus here sports sponsorship as part of a tennis tournament. Despite the importance of the issues, understanding the mechanisms operating sponsorship of sports and its influence on the attitudes and intentions of spectators remain partially unknown (Walliser, 2003). As a result, most practitioners simply count the number of exposures to the brand (Thjomoe et al., 2002). If this method is required to compare an investment in a traditional advertising investment in sponsorship activity, it does not include influence processes sponsorship. Today, corporate sponsors, in addition to the goal of awareness, hope to act on attitudes and purchase intentions towards the brand (Walliser, 2003). They pay more attention to the choice of the event ...