Research On Relationship Between Sports Sponsorship Marketing And Brand Loyalty

In recent years, Sports sponsorship marketing has been a hot topic to scholars. The importance of Sports sponsorship marketing to increase brand equity has through the test for empirical research and get the appropriate conclusions. Brand loyalty is an important component of the brand equity. However, we are lack in the empirical research about the impact of sports sponsorship marketing to brand loyalty. Mainly from the point of view of brand loyalty, the paper researchs the influence about sports sponsorship marketing on consumer’s brand, and explores the mediating effect of consumer attitude in this effect, not only enriching the theory of sports sponsorship, but also showing that Chinese enterprises should make full use of Sposorship Marketing so as to build consumer’s brand loyalty more effectively.First of all, this article tries to review literatures about the Sports sponsorship, summed up three dimensions about enterprise-the sponsorship congruence, sponsorship motive, sponsorship propagation, and three dimensions about consumer-event involvement, consumer product knowledge, sports audience awareness, and then, by normative theoretical analysis, the paper expores the inherent logic among the Sports Sponsorship, the Consumers’attitudes and Brand Loyaty. Secondly, we have an idea with that hypothesize according to the route "Sports sponsorship effects brand loyalty"after summing up the current literatures. We use prior investigation to modify the former questionnaire and building the formal questionnaire, at the end we collected 344 valid samples. We use the tools of spss.17 to describe the statistic.The results show that sports sponsorship significantly affects consumer attitude and brand loyalty, influence of specific performance in the sponsorship congruence, sponsorship motive, sponsorship propagation, event involvement and consumer product knowledge; Sports audience awareness significantly affects consumer attitude, but not brand loyalty; Consumer attitude significantly affects brand loyalty; Consumer attitude play a part of the intermediary role on the effect of sports sponsorship on brand loyalty.Predecessors mainly foucus on studying the impact of sports sponsorship to brand equity in a certain perspective, especially lacking in brand loyalty, which is the ultimate goal of brand building. Based on the predecessor’s research, the study has summed up the factors which will influence the sports sponsorship from different perspective. In addition, by collecting relevant literatures, we find that scholars are also lacking in investigating the inner effect between sports sponsorship and brand loyalty. So, the study tries to expore the mediating effect of consumer attitude in this effect. Not only enriching the theory of brand marketing, the study also provides some suggestions to enterprise in brand building.