Sport Sponsorship as Engagement Platform

These thoughts can also be applied to sport sponsorship. Sponsorship is a platform business where different sponsors engage to reach specific goals, mainly in marketing communication.

Sponsors very often invite customers, employees, politicians and others in VIP and business lounges to use the leisure experience to gain and maintain business relations. All these actors co-create value and derive individual benefits by integrating resources from the league (knows how to coordinate an attractive competition), the teams (have excellent abilities to play football), the coaches (know how to establish team spirit), the fans (know how to contribute to the stadium atmosphere) and the security staff (know how to guarantee security). Via sport sponsoring platforms, participating actors are engaging in interactive experiences based on sport activities, e.g., networking in hospitality areas during a football match.

The actor engagement (AE) approach emphasizes engagement as a psychological state emerging from such interactive experiences (Storbacka et al., 2016). Although AE is a multidimensional concept, the most obvious dimension seems to be a behavioural one. This dimension is described as customer engagement behaviour (CEB) that goes “beyond transactions, and may be specifically defined as customer’s behavioural manifestations that have a brand or firm focus, beyond purchase, resulting from motivational drivers” (Van Doorn et al., 2010, p. 254). The behavioural manifestations of customer engagement are going beyond the elementary purchasing process and describe active patterns of customers that happen voluntarily. Examples for CEB from marketing practice might be giving recommendations about products or services to one’s peer group or posting positive online comments about the brand.

Adapting the concepts of AE and CEB to sport sponsorship, the basic sponsorship transaction needs to be defined first. Sport sponsorship consists of partnerships that are based on an agreement where the exchange is clearly defined. In most sponsorship agreements, the sponsor pays or provides payment in kind in return for the acquisition of rights, like the placement of corporate logos on boards or jerseys or the use of teams or athletes for corporate purposes in marketing campaigns, social media or events.

Every performance in the relationship between sponsor (i.e., company) and sponsee/rights holder (i.e., sport club or event) that exceeds buying behaviour (mainly manifested in the sponsorship contract) can be considered as sponsorship engagement. Thus, sponsors voluntarily behave in favour of the sponsee/rights holder and provide resources that are not covered by any kind of agreement (Buser, Woratschek, & Schönberner, 2020). This may be the case when Adidas offers orthopaedic support for an injured player by manufacturing

specialized football shoes. This performance exceeds the basic sponsorship agreement but may be provided by the sponsor in order to co-create a trustworthy and long-lasting partnership with the player and the sport club.

In order to conceptualize and define sponsorship engagement, it is crucial to understand which resources are provided and integrated (Buser et al., 2020). By following AE and CEB literature (Brodie et al, 2011; Storbacka et al., 2016; Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014) as well as the SVF (Woratschek et al., 2014), sponsors and sponsees/rights holders provide other resources beyond agreed ones. Consequently, sponsorship engagement behaviour exceeds the core performances, like money or payment in kind. In return, sponsees/rights holders also integrate resources by providing rights and services as agreed in the sponsorship contract.

Furthermore, sponsees/rights holders also invest in better relationships by providing resources beyond the sponsorship agreement (sponsee/rights holder engagement). In terms of the sponsoring platform of Real Madrid, sponsors and sport club provide knowledge, e.g., the sponsors offer assistance regarding professionalizing the club’s management or human resource. Furthermore, sponsors provide ideas and innovation skills in order to develop the club’s overall performance, e.g., Microsoft provided their IT-infrastructure to develop a network system where fans can engage online within the stadium through an interactive mobile app (Soper, 2015). In addition, sponsors provide their professional network and invite guests to specialized events in the hospitality area of the stadium in order to acquire and motivate potential partners for the sport club. On the other hand, sponsees/rights holders provide a key account manager who cares about the sponsors’ inquiries as far as tickets or hospitality events are concerned although it is not part of the agreement. With a larger number of resource integrating partners, network effects can be generated. These positive effects occur when broad networks of sponsorship partners come together and enhance the overall value of the platform. The platform operating actor, i.e., the sport club or the event hosting organization, develops the platform to make it more interesting for prospective sponsors (Storbacka et al., 2016). The more attractive the platform is, the more companies will recognize these effects and will consider to join the network. The ultimate goal for sponsors and sponsees/rights holders is the development of long-term alliances and partnerships.

Furthermore, according to the SVF, platforms with dyadic or triadic relationships are not adequate to understand sport management. Other actors should also be considered, since they can integrate valuable resources on engagement platforms. Sponsorship would not happen if

leagues, teams, security staff and many other actors would not contribute to sponsors’ and sponsees/rights holders’ value co-creation process.

Figure 1 shows that sponsors, sponsees/rights holders and other actors integrate their resources on the sport sponsorship engagement platform. In this context, integrating means to provide resources and to benefit from other social actors’ resources. It is important to notice that value cannot solely be provided by any social actor. Service exchange is always reciprocal and not limited to agreements about transactions.

Figure 1: Framework for sport sponsoring as an engagement platform (own figure)