Leveraging Sponsorship on Twitter: Insights from Tennis Grand Slams

Abstract

The sponsorship of events, a below-the-line (BTL) activity, where one brand supports a property financially, or otherwise, enables it to create behavioural consequences like positive sentiment and word of mouth, as well as enhanced brand associations, trust and loyalty. While there are numerous works substantiating positive and negative effects of sponsorship, and intervening variables, that create long term stable brand attitudes, there are limited works that suggest ways for sponsors to communicate about sponsorship investments on social media, and their immediate behavioural outcomes. This work, using Twitter as social media platform, proposes one important dimension of a sponsor’s online communications, namely articulation, with sentiment and electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) as behavioural effects. Analysis of user tweet data of four grand slam tennis events for two years suggests that components of articulation (product-focused/event-focused) have mixed effects on positive sentiment and e-WOM respectively.