The Empirical Research On The Sports Sponsorship Match And Brand Equity

With the rapid development of modern society and economy, the globalization of all kinds of industry is progressing at a high speed. And sport industry has become one of the most attractive and investment valuable sunrise industry. Moreover, sports sponsorship is a very important part of sport industry and it has been paid much attention by big companies. They not only have built excellent image in customers’mind, but also have built their own brand successfully by sports sponsorship. Thus, sports sponsorship has been a very significant tool to appreciate their value of their brand.The Olympic Games in Beijing2008and The Asian Games in Guangzhou2010was successfully organized has made many inland companies realize the use of sports sponsorship that could appreciate their value of their brand. However, they have met a great amount of problem and cause their huge sum of endorsement cost in vain. To sum up, it is the problem that companies could not satisfy the match between sports sponsorship and image themselves and they have not make the best of the match of sports sponsorship in their value of brand. Therefore, the match of sports sponsorship has made a direct effect on sponsorship effect and appreciation of the value of brand in the operation about sponsorship given by companies. While the academia does not pay much attention and not have a quantitative research. Consequently, the article is from this aspect to discover the relationship and impact between the match about sports sponsorship and the value of brand in order to realize the maximization of sponsorship effect.This study is beginning from the analysis of sports sponsorship match and brand equity structure and factors to construct sports sponsorship match- brand asset model on the basis of the industrial economics, econometrics, consumer behavior, market marketing and psychology and other related theories with previous research achievements at home and abroad.At the same time, on the basis of past research, drawing lessons from those scales with high reliability and validity, designing questionnaires, and selecting Adidas as the invest object of sports sponsorship activities and students from4different universities as respondents to get the necessary data for the research. Then this study makes an analysis of the relationship between the three different kinds of matches about sports sponsorship(brand match, market match and product match)and all kinds of factors about company’s brand value(brand awareness, brand cognition, brand association and brand loyalty) and their otherness of their impact. Moreover, this study has examined the influence path and effect on brand value about the three kinds of matches. The study result shows that different sports sponsorship matches have significant otherness on the influence on all the factors of brand value. The three dimensions, brand awareness, brand cognition, and brand association. Product match has the most important function on brand value. Then it is brand match and the minimum effect is market match. On the dimension of brand loyalty, brand match is the most important one, then it is product match, and the minimum one is market match. Therefore companies need to use various sponsoring and marketing tools according to different development times, but there is not an absolute isolation between all kinds of matches. Thus, it is useful to use those study results to help companies to make relative strategies with instruction about promoting brand value. And it can be more specific to choose the object that sports sponsorship would give to. Moreover, it is in favor of the healthy development of companies in different times.