Implicit sponsorship effects for a prominent brand
Abstract
Purpose
This research seeks to examine the influence of sponsorship on spectators' consideration sets by investigating, in a naturalistic setting, whether sport sponsorship adds a prominent brand to spectators' consideration sets, with and without the explicit memory that the brand is a sponsor.
Design/methodology/approach
A field study involved 1,084 visitors to a tennis tournament. For the control group (n=276), the interviews took place before the spectators entered the stadium; interviews with the exposed group (n=808) were conducted after they had attended at least one match. Three hypotheses related to consumer status and consideration set conditions were tested.
Findings
Sponsorship can influence the likelihood that a prominent brand becomes part of the consideration set in a naturalistic setting, even without an explicit memory that the brand is a sponsor. This implicit sponsorship effect was limited to the memory-based consideration set of non-consumers of the brand.
Originality/value
This study establishes an implicit sponsorship effect for prominent brands in naturalistic environments and contributes to a better understanding of moderating (boundary) conditions.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Nicholas Ashill, the Associate Editor, and the three anonymous EJM reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The text of this article benefited greatly from the careful annotations provided by one of the reviewers.
Citation
Herrmann, J.-L., Corneille, O., Derbaix, C., Kacha, M. and Walliser, B. (2014), "Implicit sponsorship effects for a prominent brand", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 48 No. 3/4, pp. 785-804. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-11-2011-0624
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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