Abstract
Emerging online marketing strategies are an opportunity for the sport sponsorship industry as a way of complementing traditional methods. However, in-depth attention has not been given to the study of congruence effects on the effectiveness of sponsorship of sport event websites, and specifically to study the role and effects of sponsor logos. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the congruence effect of sponsor brands featured on the website of a sports event on sponsorship effectiveness in visual, attitude-related and behavioural terms, using an eye-tracker to monitor memory activation and changes in attitudes and intentions. In study 1, the role of congruence on website sponsorship was analysed, using real brands sponsoring the ninth edition of the “Mallorca 312” Cycletourist Tour (42 participants). In study 2, the congruence of fictitious brands was analysed on the effects of website sponsorship of the 37th edition of the MAPFRE (competitions brand name) Copa del Rey regatta (101 participants). Congruence is preferable to incongruence in sponsor brands, except when the sponsorship aims to boost a recall of new market brands. The results validate the importance of managing congruence levels in the online sponsorship of sports events due to the influence on sponsorship effectiveness and its impact on cognitive processing.
Highlights
Until the emergence of social media, sponsorship was one of the marketing communication tools to have undergone the fastest boom in recent decades [1]
To test Hypothesis 1 (H1), the average number of total fixations (TF) and median fixation duration (FD) were calculated for the participants exposed to each version of the website
Differences in the TF were not observed when the different versions of the websites were compared (TFcongruent mid ranks = 19.67; TFincogruent mid ranks = 13.79; TFmix mid ranks = 19.63; Kruskal–Wallis H test = 1.742, df = 2, p > 0.05), and neither were significant differences found in the fixation durations in the areas of interest (FD) (χ2 (2) = 4.577, p > 0.05; FDcongruent mid ranks = 761.24, FDincongruent mid ranks = 742.46) (Median = 362.165, Kruskal–Wallis H test = 2.169, d.f. = 0.2, p > 0.05), rejecting H1
Summary
Until the emergence of social media, sponsorship was one of the marketing communication tools to have undergone the fastest boom in recent decades [1]. The Internet offers broad potential as a tool for online sponsorship [6], building engagement, attracting user attention and activating cognitive processes [6,7], encouraging users to buy a sports product or service [8]. Set out to analyse the efficiency of digital sponsorship [6] in brand communities [9] and on social networks [10]. The event sponsorship literature used multiple “congruity” terms, such as congruence between sponsoring the brand image and event image, fit or consistency [21]. Congruity theory was initially proposed to examine whether the participants’ image of the sponsored event has consisted of the image of a sponsoring brand [24]
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