Research On Objectives And Strategies Of Sport Event Sponsorship

As an important component of sport industry, sport event involves a variety of stakeholders, which cannot be isolated from enormous financial support and social participation. Event sponsors, active both on and off the stage, become a stable consolidation, as well as a culture promoter for the mega-events. Sponsorship has played a tremendous role in promotion and becomes a backbone of the development of sport event and also an important means for modern enterprise to come out in the fierce market competition. Sport sponsorship is gradually becoming a tool of stimulating corporate development, and obtaining consumer commitment. Most contemporary researches focus on the sponsorship evaluation more than corporate sponsorship strategy, which is lack of combination with corporate objectives. From the perspective of enterprise, the paper explored the routine and strategy to accomplish sponsorship objectives, which has important theoretical and practical implications.The paper used methodology of literature view, interviews, questionnaires, and quantitative analysis to investigate the sport event sponsorship strategy based on corporate objectives. The findings includes the following,1. Through the review of relevant literature, this paper considers sport sponsorship as a sport-themed and objective-based mutual exchange with content of support and compensation. The nature of sport sponsorship is a kind of corporate marketing communication tools in essence, and previous research in terms of sports sponsorship has mainly focused on the functions and evaluation of sports sponsorship as well as the relationship between sport sponsorship and the brand strategy. However, there is less research on the relationship between objectives and strategy of corporate sponsorship.2. After the review of the development of domestic and overseas sport sponsorship, the paper discusses the drives of sponsorship development, holding the view that the globalization of the mega-event represented by Olympics and professional sports event represented by F1 delivers abundant resources, while revolution of media broadcast technology provides a strong promoting platform. And moreover the transformation of corporate marketing notion from simple exposure value to marketing communications extends the marketing capacity of sport sponsorship. 3. By comparing between the title sponsor of the same sport discipline, that is"Shanghai marathon""very 6 km", between different sponsors of the same event"Beijing 2008 Olympic Games", between different sponsored events from the same company"Federal Express", the paper finds there exists differences in terms of sponsorship objectives and promotional activities.4. Through the review and analysis of corporate sponsorship missions,the paper summarized eight key words including'improve reputation','communicate brand culture','market development','fit with the target audience','stimulate sales','develop business relations','marketing and promotion'and'corporation development'as well as three sponsorship objectives including'awareness','brand image'and'business development'. Corporate sponsorship objective has features of'diversity','pluralism', and'priority'.5. The overall framework of realizing sponsor's objectives can be divided into three parts, which are'selection','benefit'and'activation'and however there are different factors reflected in paths for different objectives.6. Based on the survey of domestic event sponsors in recent years, the paper used the method of'Factor Analysis'and'multiple linear regression'to analyze the data, the findings are that event sponsors mainly focus on shaping and enhancing brand image rather than to improve corporation awareness and business development.7. Through correlation analysis, the paper finds stronger correlations with correlation coefficient of 0.7 or above, between awareness factor and'broadcast television','logo significance','on-site cumulative audience','event level','athletes'and'event character', between brand image factor and'image match','fit of target market,'promotional theme','interactivity with aundience', and "corporate sponsorship experience', between business development factor and'direct sales opportunities','customer database', and'indirect sales opportunities'. The correlation coefficient between'broadcast television'and"awareness"objective is 0.901.8. There are problems of over-dependent on television, insense of product promotion and lack of integrated planning when Chinese enterprises are involved in the process of event sponsorship. The paper summarizes sponsorship strategies into selection strategy, return strategy and activation strategy. Furthermore, it makes some suggestions on three aspects,'mainly return and supplemented by selection'on awareness objective,'mainly selection and supplemented by activation'on brand image objective and'integrated marketing, focusing on results'on business development objective.