The Effect of a Pandemic and Lacking Live Sporting Event Attendance on Perceived Sponsorship Value

Abstract

Sponsorship as marketing communication measures increased rapidly in popularity over the last three decades before the turn of the millennium, together with a more sophisticated marketing industry (Meenaghan, 1998). After that, sponsorship was viewed as an alternative to more traditional advertising and have taken many different forms (Lardinoit & Derbaix, 2001; Cornwell, 2019). Since then, sports have been the dominating domain of the growing market of sponsorship agreements (Woisetschläger, Backhaus, & Cornwell, 2017). These agreements have been applied by corporate organizations to reach specific, diverse, and large target audiences with objectives of creating brand awareness, enhanced brand images, and sales (Lardinoit & Derbaix, 2001; Cornwell & Maignan, 1998). In widely accepted definitions of sponsorship, the commercial potential of sport entities is accessed and utilized to achieve these objectives in exchange of rights fees of cash or in-kind (Yang & Ha, 2014; Wakefield, Wakefield, & Keller, 2020). This study seeks to examine the effect of the impact related to the pandemic outbreak of a new type of coronavirus in late 2019, with the associated decease COVID-19, on the sports domain of sponsorship value in Norway. The sport industry here, was among other industries worldwide, highly affected by this pandemic. The impact involved several governmental rules, restrictions, and recommendations to minimize, map, and control spread of the virus, but it also involved the fear of infection among people (Ahorsu, et al., 2020). For the sport industry, this mainly led to cancellations and postponements of planned sporting events, closed gyms and training facilities, and the lack of live sporting event attendance (Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020).