International Differences in Sport Event Sponsorship Effectiveness

Major sports events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup have achieved global reach through extensive media coverage and the involvement of multinational sponsors. Sports provide a highly attractive mix of drama, emotion and information that attract very loyal customers: sports fans. The need to engage sports fans in meaningful ways that involve sponsors has been an ongoing focus of sports marketing research. However, relatively few studies have focused on how the effectiveness of sport event sponsorship might differ internationally and across national cultures. Our field-based study offers an important extension to current research. Specifically, we conducted an international survey of Euroleague Basketball’s fans and gathered data from 4365 respondents across ten European countries to identify country-specific patterns. The questions in the survey included fan demographics, behaviour, opinions and attitudes towards sponsors. We conducted multilevel modelling using individual and country level variables and investigated the determinants of sponsorship effectiveness, namely brand affect, and the differences among them. The findings indicated the positive effect of perceived fit, sponsor brand familiarity, attitude sponsorship, brand association, event involvement, the success of fan’s team, the number of traditional media used to follow games, and finally product/brand category usage on brand affect. Team loyalty, sport involvement, age and gender have a negative effect on brand affect. From our findings, when sport involvement and team loyalty increase, brand affect decreases. When a sport consumer uses traditional media to follow the Euroleague, brand affect increases. Interestingly, we did not observe the same effect for new media. There were differences in the effects of perceived fit and brand familiarity across countries. When country’s indulgence increased, brand affect also increased while the opposite effect was observed for masculinity. There were significant differences in brand affect across ten countries based on fixed effect model. We further explain cross-cultural differences in sponsorship effectiveness and additionally provide several implications for marketers