Peculiarities of Sponsorship in Professional Road Cycling

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All rights reserved. Sport sponsorship is any commercial agreement by which a sponsor contractually provides financing or other support in order to establish an association between the sponsor's image, brands or products and a sport sponsorship property in return for rights to promote this association and/or for granting certain agreed direct or indirect benefits. Since professional road cycling was one of the first sports to be practised commercially, sponsorship of cycling teams already started in the first editions of endurance races such as Bordeaux-Paris at the end of the nineteenth century and it has grown ever since. Today's cycling teams are in fact financed almost exclusively through sponsorship. This chapter explains the business-to-business (B2B) characteristics of team cycling sponsorship and shows how the cycling sponsorship market can be very dynamic. The duration and termination of sponsorship of cycling teams as well as a company's motives to invest in cycling sponsorship are discussed, and the importance of the integration of sponsorship into marketing communication is illustrated. We also analyse the return and effectiveness of cycling team sponsorship and conclude with some thoughts on the specific choice of the sponsorship of cycling races instead of cycling teams.status: publishe

15.5 The Olympics and the Marketing of Sports: Sponsorship

Few contemporary marketing strategies have grown more rapidly than corporate sport sponsorship as evidenced by sponsorship expenditures tripling in the past ten years. The proliferation of sponsorship opportunities, coupled with recessionary economic conditions, has required sponsoring companies to emphasize strategic market planning processes including the establishment of specific sponsorship objectives measuring impact on business. Kuzma, Shanklin & McCally (1993) advocated that a sponsorship arrangement will be consummated only when what the sponsorship offers, or the sponsorship inventory, matches what the prospective sponsor seeks to achieve. Unfortunately, previous inquiries failed to explore relationships between these variables which, therefore, became the purpose of the current exploratory study of active corporate sponsors (N = 78). Regression analysis (p\u3c.05) revealed significant relationships to exist between distinctive objectives and inventory criteria which provides sport sponsorship organizers an empirically-based benchmark for customizing proposals containing criteria directly related to the fulfillment of prospective sponsors desired outcomes

Ambush marketing and the football world cup

The last two decades have witnessed a rapid growth in commercial sponsorship, accompanied by an increasing prevalence of ambush marketing activities. Worldwide sponsorship spending was US$53.1 billion in 2013, compared with US$5.6 billion in 1987. It was projected to be US$55.3 billion in 2014 with a forecast growth rate of 4.1 per cent (IEG, 2014). Sponsorship, as one of the key marketing communication tools, is widely used by companies to increase brand awareness, improve brand image, reach large numbers of global consumers, generate goodwill and build community relations. Sport is the major category of sponsorship spending, accounting for approximately 70 per cent of global spending. International sporting events, like the Football World Cup and Olympic Games, provide fertile ground for marketing campaigns to achieve worldwide recognition due to the high profile of these events