Sponsorship-linked marketing: Opening the black box

Sponsorship of sports, arts, and causes has become a mainstream marketing communications tool. A great deal of fieldwork has attempted to gauge the relative effectiveness of sponsorship in a marketing context, but these weakly controlled field studies contribute little to our understanding of how individuals process sponsorship-linked marketing communications. By considering possible underlying information-processing mechanics, individual- and group-level factors, market factors, and management factors, together with theorized sponsorship outcomes, this paper offers a model of consumer-focused sponsorship-linked marketing communications that summarizes and extends theoretical understanding of the topic.