Research On Mechanism Of Brand Image Transfer Of Sponsor In Sports-sponsorship Marketing

It is no doubt that the year of 2008 had offered a good chance to Chinese enterprises, because a large number of Chinese enterprises appeared on the international stage of the "Olympic marketing" after the "Lenovo" became the TOP sponsor of Olympic. However, different from their achievements in sports sponsorship marketing, Chinese enterprises are not very successful in this field. Compared with other forms of marketing, sports sponsorship is a potential and vibrant market which needs a new framework for marketing theory, and it will become a whole new impetus for the marketing theory. Our lack of research and theory in this field cannot be a systematic guidance to be put into practice. Thus, this research aims to solve the problems as follows:(1) In sports sponsorship marketing, will customer connect sponsor events with brand image?(2) In the transfer of the events image to sponsor brand image, if there is indeed the image of association, are there relevant theories to explain this phenomena? whether it can play an intermediary role? How does it influence on both?(3) If this phenomena indeed exists, what factors can you use to adjust this association?For the organizers of the sports event, the business decision makers, this study will be of great significance to answers these questions.Through the review of the related literature, this research is based on brand image transferring models of Kevin P. Gwinner and John Eaton (1999), Gareth Smiths (2004), brought with it Keller's (1993) theory on the brand association and its two-dimension factors, Aaker's (1995) theory on brand image (three abstract dimensions including perceived brand quality, brand uniqueness, and organizational image), both the related theories on cognitive psychology and advertisement such as balance theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), McCracken celebrity endorsement model, schema theory and filter models, etc. to transfer the sports image to brand image through brand association. The models built in this research were tested by 228 valid samples. Through the result, which was from the analysis of the information by SPSS and LISREL, all the 14 assumptions are supported in the empirical test. Consequently, we can draw the following major conclusions:Firstly, the greatest innovation of this research is to have discovered and confirmed that the event image is the exclusive mediator that influences the brand image of the sponsors'through brand association. All the assumptions in this model are valid, from which we can draw the conclusion that the brand association is the key factor to enhance brand image by the way of affecting the two-dimension factors.Secondly, the impacts of the effects between events image and the variable of brand image can be divided into three types:direct effects, indirect effects and gross effects. We sum up the main points of the gross effect of each variable with a statistically significant (0.49,7.02; 0.45,6.87; 0.48,6.82) between the events image and the organization image, brand personality and perceived quality of the brand image, which further shows that events image and brand image are closely related to each other. That is to say event sponsorship, will positively affect consumers'perception of brand personality, organization image and brand quality.Lastly, the degree of customer involvement in the event and the consistency between events image and brand image regularly affect the brand transfer. In other words, the higher the degree of involvement is, the higher consistency between events image and sponsorship brand image will be, the more positive perception and evaluation about the brand association can be achieved. It will eventually lead to more content of the event to be transferred into the sponsors'brand image.This research brought the following indications to the corporations which will involve in the sports marketing practice:Firstly, companies should establish a wide range of sponsor brand awareness in the minds of customers by establishing association with sports events and develop brand association through sport sponsored by the integration with the other marketing communication tools. For this purpose, they should establish functional association with the prominently features of the product or property; and establish symbolic association by the users, usage occasion to form more abstract brand personality and values. On the basis of the brand association, customers attitudes towards brands will be changed, which makes the formation of brand trust or brand favor.Secondly, two ways can be used to build brand through sport sponsorship:The first one is the formation of brand sensibility, which is built up by perceived of event image and symbolic association, such as brand recognition, enterprise image, organization image. The purpose of this formation is to bring direct benefits to customers and form general brand asset;The other one is to build brand rationality through the function, attitude association, such as brand personality, perceived quality, brand loyalty, and then inspire the relationship between customers and the brand and form uniqueness brand asset.The two above ways are important to the brand management theoretically and practically.On one hand, it explains the buying behavior which can not be explained by the traditional consumer decision-making models and utility theory. It also helps enterprises to choose the appropriate marketing activities.In addition, the implementation of sports sponsorship should make an integrated consideration of the following factors:focusing on corporate interests while taking into account the interests of society, insisting on the continuity and long-term sponsorship marketing, and sticking to the integration with other marketing activities, consistence between the characteristics of activities and brand image, adapting sports sponsorship to the governmental management environment.In comparison with previous researches, the theoretical contributions of this research are:Firstly, in the previous literatures, only a few refer to the conceptual framework transferring sports image to sponsor brand image, which was proposed by Kevin, P. Gwinner and John Eaton (1999) and Gareth Smiths (2004). This research explores deeply into the influence of brand image from the perspectives of consumers, using three dimensions of brand association (attribute association, symbolic association and attitudes association) and taking consumer involvement and consistency between event image and brand sponsorship into consideration for analysis and evidence, in order to construct brand image models in sport sponsorship marketing.Secondly, this research is one of the rare literatures which focuses on the brand image transfer on sports sponsorship marketing. Its achievement not only help clarify the logical relations of event image, brand association and brand image, but also imply the proportional restrictions among events image, brand association and sponsors brand image, inspect the customer involvement, consistency of sponsors brand etc. on image transferring adjustment extent. Thus, this research is a reference material to making marketing strategies for sports sponsorship on consumer cognition, upgrading both "general brand assets" and "uniqueness brand assets".Finally, it helps to further develop the marketing theory of Sports Sponsorship by finding transferring methods, influence factors and relationship of brand image, getting more knowledge about the features of sports marketing influenced by brand image.Of course, there are shortcomings in this research. For example, the sample selection is inadequate and incomprehensive because it cannot cover more age span, different income groups, different occupations etc. As sports sponsorship is a long-time work, it would be better to keep pace with the latest news of a certain sports event and the patron. During the different stages of a sports event, we must make research on a particular group of people classified by opinions on brands and sports programs, preferences and other indicators. More researches can be made in the near future to supplement our theories and dip into this field.