SPORT SPONSORSHIP IN INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND ITS EFFECTS ON CONSUMER PURCHASING BEHAVIOUR

Abstract

Today, enterprises intensively utilize promotional efforts in order to sustain their existence, achieve their goals and have various advantages against their competitors. Promotion mix decisions or the name that used recently integrated marketing communication have been more increasingly important for enterprises as soon as conventional marketing activities aren’t sufficient for meeting various customer demands. Sponsorship as an element of Integrated Marketing Communication is one of the most effective instruments on brand awareness and consumers’ preferences with its increasing importance day-by-day. Sport sponsorship in the first place with a share of 70% in sponsorship activities is an effective instrument can be used in the realization of communication tools by enterprises with its unique characteristics.

In this study, to what extent sport sponsorship creates intention to buy and brand awareness and the impacts of parties’ behaviors on their decisions of buying have been researched. While measuring the impacts of sport sponsorship on consumer’s behavior of buying, levels of the will to buy and creating brand awareness have been reviewed comparatively. Within the scope of the research, survey has been applied on 913 people, 286 missing or wrongly filled surveys have been eliminated and 627 assessable surveys have been analyzed by using SPSS21 statistical packaged software. Results have indicated that sport sponsorship has a positive linear and highly powerful relation with brand awareness and consumer’s preference and the most powerful relation is between perspective on sport sponsorship and brand awareness.