Enhancing Corporate Business Relationship Through Hosting A Running Race Event

To develop and sustain business to business partnerships, effectively maintaining customer relationships would be critical for a company to improve its corporate performance and gain competitive edge over its market competitors. Many corporations have utilized sporting events as one of their mechanism to fulfill this objective. For instance, the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge(hereafter referred as MCC) first started in 1977 as an annual running race in New York City, with 200 runners representing 50 companies that J.P. Morgan did business with. Over the years,the number of participants at the MCC event has increased drastically; for instance,the 2013 event witnessed an all-time high of 262,311 participants, which made it the world’s largest corporate-organized road race series, covering 13 cities in seven countries throughout all five continents. In 2011, the MCC event was initiated in Shanghai; over the past three years, the event has grown considerably and in 2013, it attracted more than 7,200 race entrants from 280 companies in just its third year in China. Although the popularity of this event is increasing as evidenced by the number of participating companies and individuals, how effective a running event would influence an individual participant’s perceptions, beliefs, and attitude toward the event and the sponsoring company remains unknown. How does a sporting event really work to improve business partner relationships? What does a hosting company need to do to elevate the quality of the sporting event and also reach its marketing objectives?As a case analysis, this study was to conduct a preliminary investigation into participants’ cognitive and affective assessments of a MCC running event held in Shanghai and their impact on the commitment level of business clients on J.P. Morgan as the event sponsoring companies. Through a comprehensive review of literature, a survey form was formulated for assessing customer perceptions on business relationship maintenance, which included items measuring perceived improvement in customer relations, satisfaction, and loyalty. The items were phrased into a Likert5-point scale. Respondents(N = 80) were a sample of senior administrative members of organizations or entities doing business with J.P. Morgan, who participated in the survey right after the event. A factor analysis with principal component extraction and varimax rotation was conducted to statistically reduce the number of the perception variables. Five factors emerged for the perception variables, which were labeled as Emotion, Belief, Image, Value-added, Commitment. Descriptive statistics for these five constructs were calculated, followed by conducting a one-sample t-test for each of the constructs. The findings revealed that the mean construct scores were all significantly(p <.05) greater than the neutral parameter(i.e., the composite scorecalculated by multiplying the number of items in a construct with the neutral value of4.0 for the Likert 5-point scale) for each of the constructs, indicating that the client companies were of positively perceived impact of the MCC on customer emotions,beliefs, images, perceived value–added, and commitment toward J.P. Morgan. Further discussions are made on the theoretical and practical implications of making good use of sport events as an effective way for corporations to maintain and enhance work relations with business clients.