animals and product category haveendured for 20 years as high predictors ofad popularity.” Perhaps surprisingly, “theless you talk about your product, the morepeople like it, [and] are more likely to buyit. successful super Bowl ads can generatesales.” 

In conclusion, while cornwell concedesthat “better measures of specific sponsor -ship outcomes are sorely needed,” shebelieves that “sponsoring teams, athletes,performers, and the arts provide the storyor content for social interaction that islacking in many corporate social mediaattempts. social media interactions providethe tracking that sponsorship currentlylacks. It is the match up for the future.”

Additional references:John A. Davis and Jessica Zutz Hilbert (University ofOregon), Sports Marketing: Creating Long TermValue. Edward Elgar (Forthcoming 2014).Jesse King, Lynn R. Kahle and Angeline Close,“Introduction: The Study of Sports and EventsConsumer Behavior.” In Lynn R. Kahle and AngelineClose, Eds., Consumer Behavior Knowledge forEffective Sports and Event Marketing. New York:Psychology Press/Routledge/Taylor & Francis (2011),pp. 1–28.

observes, ”the melding of social media andsponsorship [is] the most important trendin sponsoring.”

PREDICTORSTurning to ROI from sponsorships, cornwellpoints to a study by cho et al. in the Inter -national Journal of Sport Finance, Vol. 6(2011). using nielsen Homescan purchasedata, the authors show that coca-cola’ssponsorship of the 2006 Olympic WinterGames and the 2008 summer Games“generated significantly greater consumerchoices for coke over Pepsi.” cornwell alsocites an unpublished 2010 Georgia stateuniversity Ph.D. dissertation by Davidnickell. using multi-wave survey data and ahierarchy of effects model, nickell was ableto predict the number of new buyers, andthus the financial return on the sponsorship,by estimating the customer lifetime value(cLV) of these new buyers.

If they attract customers and enhancecLV, announcements of sports sponsorshipsshould create firm value, and this is in factwhat cornwell and her colleagues find in aseries of studies (eg, Marketing Letters, 20(2), 2009). similarly, studies by chuckTomkovich, Rama Yelkur and Daniel Rozu -malski (all of the university of Wisconsin,Eau claire) demonstrate that companiesadvertising during the American footballsuper Bowl “regularly outperform themarket (as measured by the s&P 500) in thetwo-week period between the mondaybefore and the Friday after the game”(2008 Proceedings of the Society forMarketing Advances). In a 2011 pressrelease, the authors note that “humor,

A s sports fans worldwideanticipate the 2014 FIFA Worldcup in Brazil, marketers may wellask themselves whether and how

sponsoring such events can pay off forthem. John Davis (sP Jain school of Globalmanagement), Bettina cornwell and LynnKahle (both of the university of Oregon’sLunquist college of Business) recentlydirected me to academic studies whichdemonstrate the contribution sportssponsorships can make over and aboveother elements of the marketing mix.

A study of the Korean World cup whichDavis and co-authors published in the 2013International Journal of Advertising (32, no.2) finds that image congruence between asponsor and an event affects consumerresponses to the sponsor’s brand. In hisbook The Olympic Games Effect: HowSports Marketing Builds Strong Brands(John Wiley, 2012), Davis shows thatsuccessful brands such as Visa and sam -sung take a strategic approach to sportssponsorships: “They stick with theOlympics for several Olympic cycles,investing in a structured, broad-basedplatform of traditional and new mediaactivities, ramp[ing] up their Olympicmarket ing investments 3+ years prior tothe Games and another several months toa year after.”

Kahle offers as one successful exampleTide’s sponsorship of a nAscAR car. nodoubt aided by a viral video of theimpromptu use of Tide to clean an oil spillduring a race, coupons distributed at alocal mall were redeemed at a much higherrate than normal. As his colleague cornwell

EARL L. TAYLORMARKETING CASE HISTORY

What’s the Score onSports Sponsorships?Taking a strategic approach

Earl L. Taylor is chief marketing officer at the Marketing ScienceInstitute. These interviews and links to relatedcontent are available on www.msi.org.

55RESEARCH WORLD | January/February 2014