The Impact Of Onsite Marketing Activities Of Shanghai ATP Masters 1000 On Sponsor Brand Loyalty

Entering the21 st century, China has seen an increasing number of sporting events held on its territory. The 2008 Olympic Games, China Open, F1 Grand Prix Shanghai, Shanghai ATP Masters 1000, and the IAAF Diamond League, have received substantial exposure and attracted considerable public attention. Sport sponsorship marketing, an integral element of sporting event is inevitably elevated to a point that every company strives to take advantage of. How to make a difference in the severe competition of sporting event sponsorship in order to obtain consumer’s recognition is considered a top priority for firms. As a critical means of corporate branding and image promotion, in recent years sport sponsorship marketing has transformed from focusing on company exposure to the adoption of a portfolio of sponsorship marketing. By quantifying consumer’s psychological factors, companies are capable of assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship, and thus in an advantageous position in utilizing sport sponsorship marketing.This study referred to the theory of brand Loyalty in the field of psychology, via the Brand Loyalty model, to measure the consumer’s loyalty in the marketing activation activities organized on site in the Shanghai ATP Masters 1000. Beside, this study also adopted theory of Sport Sponsorship, Event Marketing and Consumer Behavior, reflected on Brand Loyalty Theory, categorized the onsite marketing activities of Shanghai ATP Masters 1000 into three sets, namely, sales, experience and performance, and explored the different impacts of those marketing activities on the dimensions of sponsor brand loyalty. By using literature review, expert interview, experiment, and mathematical statistical methods, conclusions were drawn and discussed.In general, except for sales marketing activities, both experience and performance marketing activities had significant impacts on brand loyalty. To be specific, experience marketing activities were significantly related to the capacity loyalty and quality loyalty, the two out of tree dimensions of the brand loyalty while goodwill loyalty was not significantly correlated; performance marketing activities significantly affected capacity loyalty and goodwill loyalty but did not exhibit significant effects on quality loyalty. Moreover, in terms of demography, gender differences showed significant impact on capacity loyalty in the experience marketing activities; age differences had significant impact on capacity loyalty in the performance marketing activities; whether the informant played tennis or not significantly influenced the quality loyalty in the experience marketing activities; the number of international tennis games informant attended significantly affected the capacity loyalty in the experience marketing activities as well as the capacity loyalty and quality loyalty in the performance marketing activities.Being an exploratory study, this paper did have limitations such as the quality of subjects considering the uncontrollable factors in experiments. Therefore, further research was expected to cope with those constraints and test the conclusions drawn in this study.