Factors Influencing Sponsorship Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Review and Research Synthesis

Sponsorship is a significant element of today’s marketing communication. Nevertheless, managers and researchers lack of systematic and integrative understanding of key factors that influence sponsorship outcomes and the contexts in which the relationships between sponsorship effectiveness antecedents and outcomes are stronger or weaker. The authors attempt to address this gap by providing a systematic meta-analytic review of sponsorship effectiveness that incorporates (1) cognitive, affective, and conative consumer-focused sponsorship outcomes; (2) sponsor-related, dyadic, and sponsee-related antecedents to consumer-focused sponsorship outcomes; and (3) sponsorship-related and methodological moderators of the relationships between the three antecedent categories and three outcome categories. Our findings help assess the validity and robustness of the predictive capability of the antecedents, and they also offer a more generalizable and empirically established set of factors that are vital to the achievement of key sponsorship outcomes. Several of our results afford noteworthy implications for improving the effectiveness of sponsorship research and practice.