Event sponsorship and event marketing: brand and performance-related outcomes and the moderating effects of brand orientation and organisational innovativeness

In the present study, event sponsorship and event marketing are identified as two distinct event-related marketing communications tools. As a research field, sponsorship and event sponsorship has experienced continuous research interest for the last four decades. This in clear contrast to event marketing, which only within the last 10 years has attracted research interest from marketing scholars. However, little research has been carried out in the field of (event-) sponsorship from an organisational perspective. Thus, to the author s knowledge, the present study is the first of its kind investigating both event formats, event sponsorship and event marketing, from an organisational perspective in one study. A literature review that spans the domains of branding, signalling theory and hedonic consumption helped to differentiate between the two event formats, and to provide a theoretical grounding of the two event formats. The present study evaluates the impact of event sponsorship and event marketing on the brand and performance dimensions of brand awareness, brand attitude, brand performance and financial performance. Furthermore, brand orientation and organisational innovativeness moderate the relationship between independent and dependent variables. Moreover, this research study was undertaken from an organisational perspective. There is little evidence within the field of event sponsorship and event marketing as to how organisations evaluate the performance impact of event sponsorship and event marketing. Similarly, the more established sponsorship outcomes of brand awareness and brand attitude have yet to receive research attention within an organisational research setting. This research study follows a cross-sectional research design. A conceptual model is developed on the basis of the literature review, and is tested through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling. The data for this study was collected via an online survey which resulted in 226 responses. The findings indicate a negative relationship between event sponsorship and brand performance. Furthermore, organisational innovativeness was identified as moderating the event sponsorship brand performance relationship, whereas brand orientation is found to moderate the event marketing financial performance relationship.