ANN ARBOR—New research at the University of Michigan shows that brand purpose and personality matters when companies choose how many and what sponsorships to employ to enhance brand image.

In a two-part study, Bettina Cornwell, professor of sports management at the U-M School of Kinesiology, focused on brand meaning, what a brand represents in the mind of a consumer, and brand personality. Typically, a company’s sponsorship portfolio includes some type of involvement with events, activities or individuals, and is utilized to communicate with various audiences.

Cornwell and colleagues Monica Chien (Cornwell’s former Ph.D. student) and Ravi Pappu, both from the University of Queensland, hypothesized that brand image associations may depend on perceived “fit” between a company and their sponsorships.

Furthermore, a brand’s sponsorship portfolio could influence consumer evaluations and perceptions of the sponsor’s overall image and potentially broaden community engagement, they say. For example, as an official sponsor of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the Swiss watch company Swatch exposed event spectators to its sponsorship of UNICEF through its “Kaleidoscope” project.

“Consumers process sponsorships affiliated with a brand on the basis of at least two distinct types of characteristics?category and attributes,” Cornwell said. “Sponsorship category relatedness refers to the degree of similarity between individual sponsorships in a portfolio, and event personality fit refers to the perceived similarity on the properties’ personality dimensions.”

“Knowing the relatedness of sponsorship opportunities and their subsequent personality traits allows companies to position themselves competitively and helps consumers select brands that have meaning for them, Chen said”

The research team used real events and fictitious brands to create mock newsletters for their experiments. The mock newsletters consisted of information of a brand’s sponsorship portfolio. As an example, low sponsorship category relatedness and high event personality fit portfolio contained sponsorships of the Rugby World Cup and Greenpeace, which shared the same personality (ruggedness).

Another example placed high sponsorship category relatedness and low event personality fit portfolio contained sponsorships of the PGA Golf Championship and NBA All-Star Game, but that differed in brand personalities (sophistication and excitement, respectively).

In the first experiment, researchers found that sponsorship category relatedness was an important cognitive reference point when evaluating perceived fit between sponsorships in a portfolio. Participants perceived the sponsor brand to be more exciting and rugged when the brand’s portfolio contained two categorically related sponsorships (two sports events) than when categorically unrelated sponsorships (sports event and social cause) constituted the brand’s portfolio.

In the second experiment, the research team replicated the first study by using an alternative set of sponsorship cues and a different sponsor product. Again, the researchers found evidence that sponsorship category relatedness served as anchor for fit calibration, especially when event personality fit was low. Consequently, high event personality fit (a portfolio that contained the Rugby World Cup and Greenpeace) generated a more rugged personality for the sponsor brand, compared to low event personality fit (a portfolio that contained the Rugby World Cup and Red Cross).

The results demonstrated that sponsorships in a portfolio exert influence on each other to create an overarching effect on brand meaning and personality associated with the sponsor. As a brand adds a new property or sponsorship to its portfolio, it may introduce a different set of attributes or beliefs that may or may not be consistent with an existing brand image. The matching of sponsorship personalities presents an interesting direction for future research because similarities and differences could influence consumer brand judgments.

“What this research suggests is through carefully managed sponsorship portfolios, brand managers can leverage what consumers know about a sponsorship property or event to develop associations for their own brand,” Cornwell said. “Marketing professionals might ask themselves: What sponsorship properties already exist in our portfolio and how does any new event match with these other characteristics? In order to increase the marketing communications potential of a sponsorship portfolio, an organization needs to think carefully about the image and brand clarity resulting from the combined elements.”

The study “Sponsorship portfolio as a brand-image creation strategy” can be found in the Journal of Business Research and available online.

The University of Michigan School of Kinesiology continues to be a leader in the areas of prevention and rehabilitation, the business of sport, understanding lifelong health and mobility, and achieving health across the lifespan through physical activity. The School of Kinesiology is home to the Athletic Training, Movement Science, Physical Education, and Sport Management academic programs?bringing together leaders in physiology, biomechanics, public health, urban planning, economics, marketing, public policy, and education and behavioral science since 1894. For more information, visit www.kines.umich.edu

Journal of Business Research