These days sponsorship is used as an effective marketing instrument in sports, culture, arts, festival and entertainment. Corporations try to enhance their corporate image or brand image by sponsoring various events. This study is to examine that how ...
These days sponsorship is used as an effective marketing instrument in sports, culture, arts, festival and entertainment. Corporations try to enhance their corporate image or brand image by sponsoring various events. This study is to examine that how the corporations could develop brand image using sponsorship. Concretely, the image congruity between a corporation and a sponsored event can affect on brand image. Also, the degree of the involvement of sponsorship event and self-congruity on a corporation will affect on brand image differently. 'World Cup' sponsored by 'HYUNDAI' and 'Busan International Film Festival' sponsored by 'LOREAL' are chosen through a pre-survey in this study.The first result of this study shows that image congruity between a corporation and sponsorship gives significant impact on brand image. Therefore, when corporations decide sponsorship event to enhance their brand image, they have to consider the image fit between a corporation and a sponsored event. The second result on moderate effects assuming different group effects in the degree of the involvement of a sponsored event and self-congruity on a corporation on the main effect was not supported. The involvement of sponsored event is related to how many customers have the interests and commitments on events. Although ‘World Cup' and 'Busan International Film Festival' are a nationwide scale event, they are not frequent enough to be recognized by people. Because they are held once in four years and once in a year, people can not think that the events are closely connected with themselves. As 'HYUNDAI' and 'LOREAL' are very famous global company, people didn't try to check the congruity between original self-concept and company image. They think the popular exiting image of the corporation first. So the effect of the self-congruity on a corporation couldn't be seen.This study tried to search the possibility of mediating effects because there were no differential group effects as moderators. As a result, it functioned as a mediator in HYUNDAI case but it didn't in LOREAL case except for the relationship between 'self-congruity on a corporation' and 'brand image'. The reason of the different results is suggested that there are some differences in the event scale and the sponsoring corporation numbers. 'World Cup' is only sponsored by HYUNDAI in Korea, but 'Busan International Film Festival' is sponsored by 51 companies including LOREAL in Korea.