Linking Fan Values and Sponsorship Effectiveness: The Case of Old School Values

Damon Aiken
Ajay Sukhdial
Lynn Kahle
and James A. Downing

Sport sponsorship is an ever-increasing multibillion-dollar business worldwide. In North America alone, annual sponsorship spending is fast approaching $20 billion (IEG Sponsorship Report, 2013). Of course, given tough economic times, corporations are requiring evidence of the effectiveness of their sponsorship investments (McKelvey & Snyder, 2009). Moving away from purely financial analyses, some research in this domain has focused on understanding sponsorship effectiveness by examining perceived fan-to-sponsor connections (Cornwell, Weeks, & Roy, 2005; Olson & Thjømøe, 2011).