Sponsorship: Impact on brand awareness and brand attitudes

Abstract

Sponsorship is a rapidly growing tool in both commercial and social marketing areas, in Australia and overseas. Australian health promotion foundations distribute substantial funds to arts, sports, and racing organizations for the opportunity to have these organizations' events sponsored by health promoting organizations. However, in spite of substantial commercial and health expenditures, there has been little published systematic evaluation of sponsorship. Recent years have seen far more attention to this area. This article presents the results of a study designed to evaluate sponsorship effectiveness in terms of its two main communication objectives: brand awareness and brand attitude. Two health and four commercial sponsorships were evaluated at two major sporting events. Overall, the data suggest that sponsorship can influence both brand awareness and brand attitude, and that the health sponsorships had more impact than the commercial sponsors studied. These and other data confirm the potential usefulness for greater use of sponsorship in social marketing campaigns.