The Research On The Influence Of Choice Of Events In Sports Sponsorship To Apparel Brand Equity

Creating a top brand is one of the most important development strategies for the apparel enterprises in China. More and more apparel enterprises have begun to adapt various marketing ways to promote brands. As a tool of brand spreading, sports sponsorship could improve enterprise brand equity effectively, which is excellent in the management of branding for the apparel enterprises at home and abroad.In the process of implementing the sponsorship for apparel enterprises, whether the choice of sports events is reasonable affects the result of the act of sponsoring directly. So far, however, there is not enough recognization and quantitative study on the basis that how to choose sports events reasonably. The sponsorship behavior of the apparel enterprises are relatively blindly, they have not pay enough attention on the matching degree between the sponsors and the events. On the basis of dividing congruency between the sponsor and the event into "brand congruency", "product congruency" and "market congruency", the paper uses the frame of Yoo model which separates brand equity into four core dimensions such as "brand consciousness", "perceived quality", "brand associations" and "brand loyalty", and establishes a new path model on how the three kinds of congruency affects the four core dimensions of brand equity.The study combines theoretical analysis with empirical research, which selects the sports sponsorship of LI-NING and ADIDAS as research object, and uses the data from consumer investigation to test the path how the three kinds of congruency affects the four core dimensions of brand equity. The result of the study indicates that there are obvious differences among the results on how the three kinds of congruency affect brand equity, and the influence of brand congruency is the most significant, the influence of market congruency is weaker,the influence of market congruency is the weakest; Enterprise in different stage of development must have a clear marketing planning, and take different marketing ways in the different stage; There are internal relationships among the different kinds of congruency, it is absurd that making them in isolation. The highest impact factor of brand congruency is "brand social status". And in those impact factors of product congruency, technical support and professional service are higher than products and financial support; As the brand apparel enterprises, in order to implement sports sponsorship well to improve brand equity, they must recognize their present situations, understand the advantages and disadvantages, select reasonable sponsorship methods, and clearly define the target which is needed to reach and realize on construction of brand equity in different stage of development.