Sponsorship - Attitudinal Effects of Sponsorship

Abstract: Purpose: To investigate how attitudes of hockey supporters change towards a sponsoring company depending on fan type and team commitment. Background: Sponsorship has become a widely accepted and used as a communication tool. In Sweden, sponsoring is a large part of all advertising conducted in the country. Previous studies within the subject of sponsorship show that generally sponsorship is a good affair for companies that engage in it. When it comes to sports sponsorship, hockey is the most developed sport in Sweden. Sports sponsorship is also an area where negative effects could occur due to sponsoring and the fact that many people are very passionate when it comes to sports and their favorite teams. Considering the massive amounts that companies invest in sponsoring it is of great interest to further investigate the effects of such activities. There is quite little research conducted within sports sponsoring in Sweden and therefore it is of interest both from businesses as well as the academic world to investigate the effects of sponsorship in a Swedish context. The main focus of this study is to investigate possible positive and negative attitudes towards sponsoring companies that sponsor different teams as well as effects on brand recall based on fan commitment. Method: In order to answer the purpose of this thesis a deductive approach was applied by collecting quantitative data from an experiment, control group and a follow-up study. Theories and previous research in the subject area was used in order to establish hypothesis that later has been tested.  The data retrieved through the research was processed and analyzed using SPSS. Conclusion: The results show that attitudes towards the sponsor are positive when associated with the supported team and negative when associated with the rival team. Fans viewer frequency did not have a significant impact on positive attitudes towards the supported team while fan commitment had a strong impact on negative attitudes towards the sponsor of the rival team. Brand recall was higher with highly committed fans and is correlated with fan commitment. It is concluded that negative attitudes are easily invoked by fan commitment while it is not as easy to build positive attitude with repeated viewings.