Margaret A. Johnston

The impact of sponsorship announcements on shareholder wealth in Australia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of 51 sponsorship announcements upon the stock prices of firms sponsoring in Australia. The research examines the broader question of whether sponsorship has the potential to transcend cultural boundaries and contribute to financial performance in regional markets.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on the event study technique which is applied to the estimation of excess returns that arise in response to announcements of corporate sponsorship made by leading industrial stocks trading on the Australian Stock Exchange. Regressions examine whether the cost and duration of sponsorship signal information of importance to investors regarding the financial prospects of sponsoring firms.Findings – A small, fleeting positive increase in wealth effects is observed indicating that economically, sponsorship expenditure in Australia is more or less value neutral. While investors appear indifferent to sponsorship cost, they value short‐ter...

Rules of engagement: A discrete choice analysis of sponsorship decision making

Abstract This paper draws on exchange and utility theories to propose and test a model of sponsorship decision making using discrete choice analysis. Grounded in prior sponsorship research and current management practice, the model describes sponsorship selection as a sequence of choices about sponsorship packages of differing value. The core thesis is that managers attempt to maximise their utility when selecting sponsorships by evaluating the various pay-offs from the alternatives available. This research applies a simulated choice-based experiment with 196 sponsorship managers to assess their preferences for a set of criteria likely to shape their future decisions about sponsorship selection. While perceptions of brand-image congruence and relationship quality significantly affect sponsor preferences, contrary to some evidence, short-term business arrangements appear more desirable than longer-term sponsorships.

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.

How organisations are using blended e-learning to deliver more flexible approaches to trade training

Training organisations are being asked to respond to the growing levels of diversity around the contexts for training and to examine a wider range of training solutions than in the past. This research investigates how training organisations in Australia are using blended forms of e-learning to provide more responsive, flexible and innovative training, particularly in areas of skills shortage in four trade industries. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders across the bakery, building and construction, plumbing and stonemasonry industries. Findings report on the perceived benefits of e-learning in promoting greater flexibility, improvements in teacher–student communication and interpersonal relationships, higher levels of student satisfaction and cost savings for employers. However, major barriers include the attitudes of many teachers to the use of new technologies in the classroom, including the associated strategies of the recognition of prior learning and e-portfolios to support of e-learning delivery. Finally, the study identifies future directions for research around the factors that may determine the greater adoption of e-learning strategies in the learning and training environments of our workplaces.

E-assessment: challenges to the legitimacy of VET practitioners and auditors

Abstract This research examines what practitioners in vocational education and training (VET) organisations and external auditors judge to be the key issues in the current and future use of e-assessment. Applying the framework of legitimacy theory, the study examined the tensions around the use and growth of e-assessment in training organisations, and challenges to both training bodies and auditors around their legitimacy to operate. Forty-eight interviews, 10 focus groups and 2 industry workshops were completed with practitioners and auditors who had in-depth experience in e-assessment and audit practices. Results revealed tensions between training providers and auditors around the current validity, authenticity and security of e-assessment. However, there was also strong agreement between the groups about the practical steps for resolving these tensions between auditors and VET institutions.

Third-person perceptions of gambling sponsorship advertising

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine perceptual and behavioural components of the third-person effect for sport sponsorship marketing communications by legalised gambling companies. Specifically, this research examines judgements about the perceived influence of gambling sponsorship on self, children, and other adults. It also investigates behavioural reactions towards the censorship of gambling sponsorship, and intentions to gamble with sponsors. Design/methodology/approach – An online survey was fielded to a commercial consumer database and yielded 511 usable responses. Four hypotheses were tested to examine perceptions of the effects of gambling sponsorship on self and on others, and whether perceived differences in self/other effects influenced pro-censorship behaviours and gambling intentions. Findings – Findings reveal a range of responses to sport sponsorship by gambling companies. Some individuals view gambling sponsorship positively, they are anti-censorship, and happy to bet with sp...

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.

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.