A Study on Attitudinal Constructs Influencing on Olympic Sponsorship

올림픽마케팅에서의 스폰서십 효과에 관한 연구

While the corporate practice of sponsoring major events has existed since the turn of the century, it has only recently become one of the fastest growing areas of advertising and promotion. Despite its long history and recent growth, however, event sponsorship has yet to receive the same kinds of rigorous theoretical and methodological attention that marketing researchers have devoted to other areas of advertising and promotion. Also, the recent Olympic Games in Sydney serve as excellent showcase of the sponsorship phenomenon. On the hand it becomes very clear that an event of such magnitude cannot take place without the commercial support of the sponsors. At the same time, there is a growing concern that the Olympic Games are losing their spirit and are over-commercialized because of the excessive sponsorship-linked marketing activities. At the centre of the debate is the impact and the reaction of the consumers to the growing use of sponsorship to stage major events. While the Olympic Games might be an extreme example of the growth and impact of sponsorship, the proliferation of the phenomenon is widespread across other sports events as well as other cultural and community based events. But a comprehensive model of sponsorship is not currently available in the literature. This research is the aim of the current research to investigate consumer attitude constructs towards sponsorship such as sport involvement, attitude towards the event, attitude towards commercialization. The results still have potentially significant applied and theoretical implication. First, This investigation is the first known effort, grounded in consumer behavior theory, to model antecedent variables believed to influence consumer response to event sponsorship in Korea. Second, these findings are in line with previous research, as sports involvement attitude towards the event, and attitude towards commercialization are found to be significant influences on respondents' ability, motivation and opportunity to process sponsorship information, as well as directly and indirectly impacting emotional response.