Sports sponsorship is a common marketing strategy for many commercial organisations. There has been an interest in examining the effectiveness of this strategy particularly in terms of the recall rate of sponsored brands. In recent years, eye trackers have been employed to provide deeper insights in sports sponsorship research. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the potential contributions and methodological challenges in the use of eye trackers in sports sponsorship research. The paper will conclude with a discussion on the future directions of sports sponsorship research.
TopBackground
Many research studies in sports sponsorship have focused on whether spectators are able to recall the sponsors after watching an event (Chadwick & Thwaites, 2005; Cornwell & Humphreys, 2013; Meenaghan & O'Sullivan, 2013; Walliser, 2003). As spectators of sports events are exposed to sponsors at the sporting venues for a prolonged period of time, it is not unexpected that spectators will be able to recall sponsors (Bennett, 1999; Walliser, 2003). Research across many sports including American football (Moore, Pickett, & Grove, 1999; Newell, Henderson, & Wu, 2001), basketball (Maxwell & Lough, 2009; Turley & Shannon, 2000), car racing (Kinney, McDaniel, & DeGaris, 2008), cricket (Boshoff & Gerber, 2008), soccer (Bennett, 1999; Biscaia, Correia, Ross, & Rosado, 2014; Dekhil, 2010; J. H. Lee & Bang, 2005), swimming (Leng, 2017) and tennis (Herrmann, Corneille, Derbaix, Kacha, & Walliser, 2014) have largely established that sports sponsorship is effective. The proportion of respondents who correctly identifies at least one sponsor ranged from 60% of respondents (J. H. Lee & Bang, 2005; Stotlar & Johnson, 1989) to more than 85% of respondents (Biscaia et al., 2014; Moore et al., 1999; Turley & Shannon, 2000). Other studies using the mean number of correctly recalled sponsors as an alternative measure of sponsorship effectiveness have also found that sports sponsorship can be effective (Dekhil, 2010; Kinney et al., 2008).