Rethinking Sports Sponsor Misidentifications

The 2014 World Cup had barely begun when GlobalWebIndex reported that MasterCard was misidentified as a sponsor in the credit card category and ranked just behind true sponsor Visa. This particular sponsor misidentification should not be surprising, given that MasterCard was a FIFA World Cup sponsor from 1990 to 2006. What is surprising is that, with every major sporting event, we seem to rediscover the potential of foils (bogus sponsors) to be recognized by a panel of respondents as official sponsors. Moreover, we conclude again and again that this signals that the sponsors’ money was wasted. Not so fast.

When consumers choose a foil from a list and label it as a sponsor of a mega event, it’s a sign that the foil brand or company is big enough to sponsor the event in question. In 2012, Toluna found that 16% of 1,034 U.S. consumers surveyed thought that Google was a sponsor of the 2012 Olympic Summer Games. Further, 60% of those asked about their feelings regarding the sponsorship indicated that it made them feel more positively about Google. Nice for Google, admittedly, but not necessarily damaging to the “true” official sponsors. 

Foils also work via association. Academic research has shown repeatedly that the misidentification of a foil as a sponsor is due, in part, to the relatedness, or the logical link, that the brand holds to the event. Running shoe, running event, voilá! When one combines size and relatedness, and a bit of clever marketing, you get the advantage that Nike holds whenever it’s listed as a foil in a survey of sport event sponsors.

Yes, the false recognition of a foil as a true sponsor also can result from ambushing, when a non-sponsoring brand becomes associated with the property of interest, which may, of course, be detrimental to the true sponsor. However, at least one research study has shown that the presence of a competitor actually can help consumers’ recall of the true sponsor. Because the event, the sponsoring brand and its direct competitor are all likely linked in memory by the event context, this actually could support memory links to the true sponsor. 

praveen sharma

pgdm 2nd year