George S. Spais

The Evolution of Scholarly Research on Sponsorship: Expectations About the Future of This Research Domain

This study examines how scholarly research on sponsorship has evolved from 2001–2011 and envisages the shape of this domain from 2012–2014. From the 6,240 words counted in 573 articles, we identified prominent themes around “sponsorship,” “sponsor,” “sport,” “brand,” and “marketing” from 19 key concepts. We assessed sets of concepts that best reflect the sponsorship theme by conducting a series of multiple linear regression analyses. Trend analyses from 2012–2014 indicated prospects for a dramatic increase in research activity around six topics. We anticipate the rate of sponsorship research will continue briskly in line with the continued escalation of global sponsorship expenditure.

The Effect of Sport Sponsorship Programs of Various Sport Events on Stock Price Behavior During a Sport Event

This paper examines sporting events spillover effect to investors behavior through event study analysis using the GARCH (p,q) model, focusing on the stock price effects of a sport sponsorship program during and after a sporting event. Studying stock price behavior during a sporting event is attempted for the first time in the marketing and sponsorship literature. First, we provide some summary points from the review of 40 research works and interpretive claims, based on a conceptual and theoretical framework. Second, we consider daily stock returns of 28 listed companies that have sponsored 15 major sports events during the period 2000–2009, in order to examine the effect of major sporting events on sponsors’ stock returns and volatility. The three research hypotheses are supported. Research results show that stock returns and volatility changed significantly during and after the sporting event compared to pre-event period. Results show that stock price effects caused by sports events’ sponsorship programs are firm-specific, as well as sporting event-specific. The findings of this study are of high value for promotion managers as it allows them to become more critically aware of the practical wisdom of sporting events.

Conceptual Foundations of Sponsorship Research

This study maps the semantic evolution of sponsorship research to develop a richer understanding of how the field has evolved. Using Leximancer text-analytics software, we conduct a content analysis of 841 sponsorship article abstracts from over 150 scholarly journals (1980–2012). We map the semantic evolution of the sponsorship concept and formulate a new definition of sponsorship research. Four foundational pillars of sponsorship research are identified: (1) intellectual, (2) strategic, (3) behavioral, and (4) relational. Sponsorship research is theorized to involve the investigation of the delivery of value to companies arising from the strategic implementation of their sponsorship marketing objectives.

How Does '3-D Negotiation' Move Beyond in a Dimension of a Win-Win-Win Approach for Integrated Bargaining Solution Analysis of Vertical Cooperative Advertising Campaigns?

The research aim of this study was to examine the possibility to investigate win–win–win Spais-Papakonstantinidis model in order to develop an integrated bargaining solution analysis for vertical advertising campaigns under the prism of the “3-D Negotiation.” First, the author provided some summary points of the critical case of Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and Wal-Mart. Second, the utility functions were extended based on authors previous works and the findings of the critical case study. The author considered a simplified situation where a brand manufacturer and an independent retailer are renegotiating, assuming that the negotiations occur in an incomplete and asymmetric information environment.

Building adult educational programs in entrepreneurship based on mezirow: the case of agricultural entrepreneurship

This chapter reports on a study of the benefits of the Integrated Education in Agricultural Entrepreneurship (IEAE). IEAE substantially covers the transfer of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will allow in each farmer-learner to plan, to launch, and to manage his/her own business and it should be approached from leadership perspective and as a life-long learning process. Entrepreneurship constitutes an important factor that determines the level of economic growth, competitiveness, employment, and social prosperity of a small country such as Greece (Spanoudaki, 2008). For purposes of this chapter agricultural entrepreneurship is defined as an effort developed individually or collectively for the exploitation of resources that the individual or the team allocates for the production of useful agricultural products, services, or goods connected with the production of agricultural products and their distribution in the market, satisfying market needs. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Bosma & Levie, 2010), entrepreneurship is conceptualized as each effort for building a new business or a new activity, such as the free profession, where the creation of a new business, or the extension of an existing one, is done by an individual or by teams of individuals, from public institutions or from established private businesses.

Sponsorship Research: Drawing on the Past to Shape the Future of Sponsorship

This study examines how scholarly research on sponsorship has evolved between 1980 and July 2012. While various scholars (e.g., Cornwell and Maignan 1998; Pope 1998; Walliser 2003) have documented the progress of sponsorship research previously, this review departs from existing perspectives and redirects the conversation in the sponsorship literature by focusing attention on the semantic relationships among sponsorship concepts and the ways in which they have changed over time. Using Leximancer text-analysis software, we explore the emergence and growth of ideas and topics in sponsorship research by undertaking a systematic analysis of ideological trends. The research objectives of this study are: (1) to identify the scholarly trends through an empirical assessment of research across the history of sponsorship; and (2) based on the trends identified, to shape the future of sponsorship research. We collected titles and abstracts of articles in sponsorship presented in scholarly journals to July 2012. Guided by previous authors, we focused specifically on sourcing abstracts since abstracts encapsulate a concise summary of an article’s core issues and are therefore lexically dense (Cretchley et al. 2010). We sourced abstracts for our analyses from multiple databases (e.g., ISI Web of Science, Scopus, EconPapers (RePEc), PsycINFO and GoogleScholar) and from over 150 marketing journals. We included abstracts from journals in languages other than English where English translations of the abstract were available electronically (Walliser 2003). In total, we collected 804 articles published across 144 scholarly journals. Next, we created subsets of the data in 10-year periods (1980-1989, 1990-1999, and 2000-2009), and one for 2010-2012. Using Leximancer software (Version 4.0), we produced a set of concept maps and reports showing semantic structures across the history of sponsorship for each of the four periods (see Smith and Humphreys 2006). The concept map of the entire corpus of abstracts revealed a core set of concepts that are recurrent and quite evenly distributed throughout the history of sponsorship. Sponsorship, marketing, objectives, value, strategy, companies, important, and key are concepts central to sponsorship’s intellectual identity. We identified two primal opposing but complementary forces around sponsorship measurement (e.g., consumers, awareness, brand, effects, image, impact, media, advertising) and sponsorship management (e.g., industry, benefits, rights, business, organizations, management, development, financial). Based on examination of the prominent concepts within each period, we defined the 1980s as the Intellectual Era (television, important, business, benefits, and advertising); the 1990s as the Ambushing Era (objectives, ambush, support, major, and corporate); the 2000s as the Consumer Era (products, financial, media, role, and market); and as the 2010s as the Relationships Era (professional, team, relationship, social and value). In the decade 2010-2019, we expect to observe the development and empirical exploration of more managerially focused models of sponsorship that center on better understanding the development of sponsorship strategy and the extraction of value from sponsorship investment. Going forward, the integration of social media as a sponsorship-marketing tool could also define a new era of research. In brief, adding a new data set to earlier reflections on sponsorship deepens our understanding of the role that key concepts and their inter-relationships have played in shaping sponsorship scholarship to date. We strongly believe the current study lends a high level of credibility to our insights about sponsorship’s past that can richly inform discussions about the future directions of sponsorship research.