The Transfer from a Major Sport Event to a Sponsoring Brand: Vision of the Sport Tourist

Introduction

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries and even more in the current crisis and economic uncertainty. Recently, the G20 world leaders have acknowledge the importance of trips and tourism as economic driver of employment, growth and economic recovery (UNWTO, 2012; WTTC, 2013).

In the last report published by Familitur, tourists stated that sport event tourism is one of the reasons that arise among others to travel (IET, 2012). This type of tourism can elevate to world-wide level the importance of the country or host city and reposition its image (Smith, 2004; Walker, Kaplanidou, Gibson, Thapa, Geldenhuys, & Coetzee, 2013).

Likewise, companies disburse big quantities of money to sponsor a sport event (Chen & Zhang, 2011). However, we have detected a gap in the literature about the study of the transfer between event and sponsor (Chang, & McAleer, 2012; Reyes, 2013; Smith & Stewart, 2007; Weed, 2009).

To tackle this problem, this chapter, that synthesizes a wider investigation developed in the doctoral thesis of the author, postulates the need to continue investigating in this field which has received little attention so far (Wann, Melnick, Russell, & Pease, 2001) but nowadays is getting an increasing interest (Preuss, Seguin, & O’Reilly, 2007; Weed & Bull, 2012), this is in order to provide companies with recommendations on how to optimize their management.

In this context, to develop a model of sport sponsorship that collects the main contributions of the literature, we have reviewed the sport tourist behavior models and the theories of sport sponsorship. Specifically, we propose a model based on the Models of Transfer (Gwinner, 1997; Pracejus, 2004) applied to the transfer of the perceived value and to the transfer of the experience. These two concepts, closely tied to this type of tourist behavior, have gain importance in the discipline of marketing because of the consumer’s sophistication and the increase in competition, among others.

Therefore, this chapter establishes a theoretical hypothesis:

• Hypothesis: A transfer between the event and the sponsor in terms of perceived value and experience exists.

With the intention of contributing theoretically and empirically to marketing knowledge, we propose as a general objective of this chapter to introduce a model that joints the theories of consumer behavior and the theories of sport sponsorship within the framework of a major event.

The above allow us to establish a group of objectives with possible scientific interest, as follows: the main objective is the analysis and evaluation of the perceived value-experience by the sport visitor to an event- sponsoring brand. We divided this aim in other four, one for each of the raised relations, and all of them referred to the sport visitor. This way, an analysis of the transfer event-sponsor is performed, about both experience and perceived value. And it analyses the effect of the experience on the perceived value, on both the event and the sponsor brand. It also includes the backgrounds taken into account and finally the effects of the model.

To reach the purpose and the exposed aims, the chapter is organized in several sections: the first one is devoted to literature analysis, then the methodology is illustrated and finally results are described. A conclusion summarizing the main results is available at the end of the paper.

Background

In order to provide a theoretical model, we applied theories that gave consistency to the model relations. For this reason, we considered important to tackle two different reviews within the general framework of the sport tourism. On the one hand, we explored theories on tourist behavior. On the other hand, we analyzed the theories on sport sponsorship. For this reason, this section first deepens into the concept of sport tourism and then it details consumer behavior models and the main theories on sport sponsorship.