Sport Sponsorship: an Alternative And Global Way of Communication - Dissertation Example

Sport sponsorship: an alternative and global way of communication.  Sponsorship is the primary vehicle of relaying message from one person to another or from one place to another. By sponsorship the message stays alive with the source as well as with those to whom the message is passed. Sponsorship moves beyond geographies and is very relevant in the present age. It would be better to say that sponsor ship is a kind of communication. One more definition of sponsorship is promotion or a process of legitimate marketing. Moreover sponsorship is a globally accepted term. (Read, 1996) Sponsorship can be said as a guide for someone through the steps, the solution and the recovery of the problem. (McQ, 2002) Sponsorship is defined as “investing in causes or events to support overall corporate objectives and/or marketing objectives” and sponsorship activities may include a number of marketing and promotional components. Sport sponsorship has been defined as “a business relationship between provider of funds, resources and services and a sport event or organization that provides the sponsors some rights and an association that may be used for commercial advantage”. (Milne & Donald, 1999: 122) Sponsorship has increased in leaps and bounds in the recent age because firms believe that sponsorship is a very innovative and effective means to communicate with the consumers. Sponsorship actually adds a positive edge to all the existing promotional tools and increases the viability of the products and the services. It has been found that with the passing days corporate sponsorship of sporting events have increased a lot and it occupies almost a two-thirds share of the entire expenditure done on sponsorship of all the events because sports by and large is the most effective means of communication as sporting events reach the consumers beyond all differences. The motto of sponsorship may be name exposure that is becoming known to every target consumers as well as image enhancement, which means the consumers should hold a high esteem about the particular product or service. Sponsorship also helps the manufacture to understand the changing habits of consumers. Sponsorship cannot be substituted with advertising because the function of advertising is to sale the product or services only but the function of sponsorship goes much beyond that in the sense that sponsorship continues to maintain the good reputation, good-will, understanding the corporate identity and maintain the name familiarity and in the process solidify the advertisement campaign which in turn increases the salability of the product or the services. (UIPM, 2006) Sponsorship is one of the methods of non-profit marketing but it is not same as voluntary funding because the motive behind sponsorship is profit although it does not fetch profit directly. It can be also called a long-term investment, which has a high chance of giving big returns. The act of sponsorship is mutually beneficial to both the sponsor as well as the event organizers for whom it is sponsoring. The aim of sponsorship is to create an emotional bond with the consumers and the product. Changing life style and changed social priorities have pushed sponsors to sponsor more for services with which the consumer can relate on more personal levels or sponsor events which are close to person as an individual like a sport activity. Sponsorship communicates the message of the company in a different, new and less commercial form. (Rentschler, 1999)   In the present age sponsorship constitutes a wide array of activities related to communication process that uses sport and lifestyle events to disseminate the message to the target audience. Due to the growing technological breakthrough apart from getting access to the national sport channel almost all the countries in the world can watch the sports channel of other countries only with a minimal amount of fee. This situation creates a wonderful opportunity for sponsors to intelligently select regions of a particular country or a city in which they might promote their products or services. Due to increasing sports coverage the firms and companies fast capitalized this event so that they could expose their products at a greater scale. Similarly drastic change in the lifestyle of people sport related sponsorship gained a lot of attention. Increasing demand for fitness regime and sport activities and the value placed on pleasure provided sports with more visibility thus giving the sponsors a reliable source for transmitting their commercial messages. During the year1970 marketing or sponsoring through sport activities merely served the personal interest of the top-level executives or it was a way of charitable contribution. With the beginning of the 1980s the scenario completely changed as the priorities of the companies had also taken a swing and they had to be wise enough before investing the money allocated for sponsorship. The main motive of sponsorship through sports is to market the product or services through the lifestyle of the people. Exclusivity in a sponsorship campaign is something which attracts the attention of the sponsors because exclusivity helps to get noticed in a more focused manner and as sport events generally gives that exclusivity to firms and companies therefore sponsoring in a sports activity may become a natural choice. A company generally chooses a sport or an event with particular attributes because that may strengthen or change the insight about the company or its product among the consumers. Effective sponsorship is then when there is a strong correlation between the target consumers of the company and the target audience of the sport or a particular event. The statement may be well explained with the example which says that the electronics giant Philips had a great success after it sponsored the World Cup Soccer Tournament because it can be deciphered that the target consumers of high end electronic goods will mostly be the youths and similarly the target audience of the soccer tournament will more or less compose of the youth population. (Mullin, Hardy& Sutton, 2007)  As to how sports sponsorship may be effective can be studied from the examples, which says that the sale of Coca- Cola increased went by 12% more as compared to the last summer after they had remained the title sponsors of the World Cup festival. Similarly the electric giant had trebled its profit in the second quarter of the year 1994 because they had sponsored the World Cup Soccer tournament and they believe that resultantly their sales had increased a lot. Big corporate houses many times are seen to attribute their increase in sale to the fact that they had remained sponsors to big sporting events. (Monye, 2000:169)   In order to delve into the study about the role of sports sponsorship in global communication it is very essential to recapitulate the definition of communication. Communication involves transmitting of the desired message from one person to another or from one medium to another. It is a two way process of sharing information and feelings. (Radcliffe, 2000) There may be different forms of communication and the aim of communication is basically is to inform, remind or bring about a certain activity. The essence of successful communication is that the communicator and the receiver of information must have a common clear message. (Kroon, 1995) Cousins and Slack (1996) confirm that sport sponsorship can be a very effective means in enhancing the corporate image. (Shilbury, 2009) For example Visa one of the Olympic sponsors since the year 1986 is known as the most successful sports sponsor in the world. Through being an Olympic sponsor Visa aimed at creating association with local partners so that they can speak with the customers both in the site of the Olympics and through the various media outlets. Sports sponsorship continues to be driven by personal identification, emotional content, brand loyalty to sports and the opportunity of cross-cultural communication. The facts that sport sponsorship contribute to purchase intentions and consumer behavior cannot be disregarded at any point of time. According to Pope and Voges (2000) consumers purchase intention depends mainly on two factors these are positive image of a brand and brand familiarity and if positive image of the brand is considered then we will see that the consumers give a positive edge to the brand which sponsored sport because the activity of sport itself has a high notion for the general public. (Shilbury, 2009: 261) In the recent age sport activities are produced in such a commoditized way through the global media that it has started affecting cultural identities of the people. (Slack, 2004). Rowe and colleagues (Slack, 2004 : 230) have said that major sports events like Olympics, European and Commonwealth games, World cup of cricket and soccer proves to be the most powerful intersections of media, nations and sports. Through sponsoring in sporting events nations and cities present themselves as preferred location for industrial investments and also suitable locations for holding conferences, conventions and tourism, in a way it can be said that the countries or regions make an attempt to compete with each other. On the other hand it will not be wrong to say that sporting events flattens the differences between us as nations or regions so sponsorship at sport events may at the same time bring about a global acceptance of the product or service and in turn increases the popularity of the brand and can also increase the profitability of the product. Sponsorship through sporting activities may two very important benefits like sports contain a lot of meaning for an individual in his or her life whether it be ice-hockey in Canada, baseball in USA or cricket in India people can easily relate to it and sports provide an escape from our everyday life and becomes part of one’s self identity (Amis& Cornwell, 2005). This emotional bonding of people with sports help the firms to use sports as an effective medium to transmit their desired message going beyond language and culture which are the certain barriers faced by other conventional media. Some sports like the Fifa World Cup, the National Baseball Championship, and the Olympics have a global appeal for the people and thus sponsorship in such events provide a platform for those organizations that operate on a global level an opportunity to communicate with its global customers. (UIPM, 2006) One important thing which can be found out after studying the behavior of consumers is that sports personalities are very successful in bringing about behavioral compliance from the consumers (Kahle and Riyle, 2004) so there is abundant use of sport personalities during sponsorship because that has a lasting effect on the people. Sporting events thus can be seen is used as a global marketing rather it is best said a that sporting events is the biggest platform for global marketing of products and services and in the recent years the various firms and organizations have capitalized it in the best possible way so that their brand gets a worldwide recognition and it remains a familiar name to consumers throughout the world.  We may conclude from the discussion that sponsorship at sports events is comparatively new method and the sole method behind it is increasing the revenue of the firm or the company. It can be clearly understood as to why sports are chosen as the effective modes of communication because sports has mobility beyond any barrier. Regardless to which part of the globe we belong to it is obvious we will enjoy a soccer match between Argentina and Germany and we will be glued to our television sets and if such an event is sponsored by an international brand like Nike it is obvious we will be attracted to its product. Also here it may be said that the sports converts the world to a global village and therefore the giants who sponsor such events is bound to become popular at a global level or it can be simply said that sports sponsors communicate with its consumer at a global level. (“Promotion- Sponsorship”,n.d) Moreover sports play an intrinsic part in a person’s life as it is considered something, which can be trusted. Therefore firms or companies feel that their target audience can best be approached through the medium of sports and it is a known fact today sports program me reaches the entire household and most of them are interested in it. Not only that but also a company like the Coca-Cola has innovated certain sponsorship strategies like when they are sponsoring an international sports event like the World Cup Soccer tournament they claim that if a consumer is able to collect certain digits from the crown of the bottle then he or she will get a chance to meet a celebrity sports personality, that automatically raises a desire in our mind and we tend to buy the product in more numbers because we have a high image of a sports star in our mind and we will feel obliged to meet such a personality and in the process the sale of the product increases and in the due course the profit.      References 1. Amis J, Cornwell B, 2005, Global sport sponsorship, Oxford: Berg Publishers 2. 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