Decision-Making Processes for Different Categories of Sport Sponsorship

Abstract: Sport sponsorship is becoming an increasingly used marketing measure. Companies spend billions of dollars on sponsoring every year and revenues from sponsoring constitute an essential part of the sport associations' and athletes' businesses. Despite this, many aspects of sponsorship are still unexplored. This thesis aims to create a better understanding for how decision-making processes work and differ for varying categories of sport sponsorship collaborations in Sweden. This is done through interviewing ten Swedish companies active in a number of industries and studying the composition of their sponsorship activities and processes. By analyzing the results from the interviews with the help of relevant marketing and management theory, structures in the decision-making processes of the different sports sponsorship categories are found. It is shown that some sponsorship categories can be defined as traditional, with characteristics such as long lasting contracts, vague objectives and inconsequential use of policies leading to indistinct decision-making processes and results. Meanwhile, other sponsorship categories can be defined as modern, with attributes like large decision-making units, distinct strategies and active involvement from the sponsoring company, resulting in sponsorship activities corresponding closely with the core business activities.