Business Administration: Sponsorship and the Olympics Games:The comsumer perspective

Sponsorship has become a very important and broadly used marketing communications medium. Many companies in order to avoid the existence of high clutter in the traditional elements of the communications mix (advertising, sales promotion, personal selling and public relations), have resorted in using sponsorship to achieve their objectives. Therefore, sponsorship investment worldwide has increased substantially and has generated the need for continuous evaluation of the sponsorship effectiveness, which will justify the huge investments. Lately, most of the academic research has experienced a shift in research and has been focusing on examining the sponsorship mostly from the consumers’ point of view, than from the corporate point of view. The purpose of this study is to measure the effectiveness of sponsorship, by measuring the awareness of the Greek consumers on the official sponsors of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. Two reasons make this specific event very important and suitable for research purposes: the fact that the Olympic Games are a world-class event and the fact that the Athens 2004 Games are celebrating the return of the Olympic Games to their place of birth. The main instrument for collecting data for this study, has been a survey administrated to Greek consumers that specifically measures their recall a ability, as well as their attitudes towards the sponsoring companies. The results that come out from the survey show that National sponsors are mostly the companies that have the highest levels of recall and recognition, compared to the official supporters and the Olympic partners. Additionally, significant differences in the levels of awareness were found between different groups of respondents. Finally, as shown from other studies, consumers’ attitudes although positive, they are not translated into immediate change in purchase intentions. Sponsorship will continue to grow even more in the future, but the companies must give much attention in how to select and develop effectively a sponsorship programme.