Scottish universities sporting events: the reasons behind different types of sponsorship.

Abstract

Scottish universities' sporting events have increased in number over the past few years thanks to the sponsorship they are receiving (SSS 2016 and BUCS 2016). Nowadays, sponsorship has become a vital component of the modern marketing milieu (Lobo et al 2014) and is also the fastest growing marketing medium (Dolphin 2003). For this reason, this paper, will assess Scottish universities' sporting events sponsorship, in terms of the firms' sponsorship objectives, their leveraging activities and the methods they use to evaluate the effectiveness of this activity. A qualitative approach with a non-probability convenient sampling was undertaken with the use of seven semi-structured (expert) interviews. Results have agreed with the already existing literature regarding sporting events sponsorship , however, as this study has been the first one to investigate Scottish universities' sporting events sponsorship, many discrepancies with the literature have also been found. Moreover, some interesting points have also emerged from the literature, such as: the willingness of companies to support female sporting events, the possibility of recruitment being a main objective to sponsor this type of event and the popularity of measuring sponsorship effectiveness with the use of a cost and benefit analysis. To conclude it must be said that further research in this area is encouraged with the use of a larger sample.