An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Exhibition Sponsorship Matching On Sponsor Brand Equity

In recent years,as the Central Government has increased the management and standardization of the exhibition industry,the market-oriented operation of the exhibition has also been further accelerated.The organizer of the exhibition follows the laws of market economy and gradually follows the business model of large-scale sports events in an effort to explore the exhibition sponsorship resources,hoping that through marketing strategy to get more corporate sponsorship.Academic attention to sponsorship marketing is increasing,but the vast majority of academic literature focused on the field of sports activities.There are also a small number of studies on the field of art activities.The study of sponsorship marketing in exhibitions is still a little.However,with the deepening of market-oriented exhibitions,exhibition-sponsored marketing has been rapidly developed,and has drawn increasing attention from enterprises.Therefore,it is necessary to study the exhibition sponsorship marketing.Through the relationship between sponsorship marketing,sponsorship matching,brand equity,sponsorship marketing and brand equity,combined with the theory and predecessors' research,this paper builds a sponsorship match-brand equity model.Then,taking the viewers of HOTELEX in 2017 as the survey object,355 questionnaires were collected and the data were analyzed by software such as SPSS22.0 and AMOS24.The research hypothesis was carried out by the method of structural equation model analysis.Through the empirical analysis,the conclusion is drawn:(1)The impact of exhibition sponsorship matching on sponsor brand equity exists;(2)The impact of image matching is greater than that of function matching according to the influence of different matching types;3)Although the influence of function matching is not as great as that of image matching,the function matching still has a significant impact on all dimensions of brand equity;(4)The correlation between functional matching and brand awareness is the strongest,the second is the correlation with brand association,and the weaker is the correlation with brand loyalty;(5)The correlation between image matching and brand loyalty is the strongest,followed by the correlation with perceived quality,and the weakest relationship with brand awareness;(6)Compared with sports sponsorship,sponsored exhibitions can make sponsors directly and accurately reach the target market,so the effect on brand equity is more significant.Finally,the author also put forward the management suggestion to the sponsor enterprise.The enterprise should choose different forms of sponsorship according to its own stage of development.