Strategie, Marketing und Informationsmanagement – serie

​Philip Gross addresses a new opportunity for growing brands that may reside within a sponsorship alliance. Typically, brands vie for image transfer from an event or other property when entering a sponsorship engagement. Yet this practice leaves a valuable part of a sponsorship alliance unexploited. Specifically, the author infers from theories of social and cognitive psychology to propose and test a research model that accounts for a sponsor to also gain from brand attitude and personality traits innately tied to a co‑sponsor of the same event. The results provide evidence for direct image transfer between two sponsor brands. Hence, pairing with a co‑sponsor might fortify or dilute a sponsor brand's image depending on the expediency of the image conveyed by that ally.

1.0 Introduction In the popular film "Wall Street", the ruthless investment banker played by Michael Douglas, devotes an ode to "Greed", as part of his speech to the shareholders' meeting of a paper company he aims at acquiring: "The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for the like of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works! Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of evolutionary spirit. .. " Even though the aforementioned acquisition deal did eventually fail, in today's economy M&A activity is surging to levels previously unknown. With the exception 1 of the first quarters of 2002 , the last decade has been characterised by unprecedented 2 number of transactions • It appears that "greed" is gaining ground amongst top executives and shareholders. Inasmuch as greed is an integral part of human nature, so is the propensity to grow and develop a part of organisational nature. Greiner (1998:p.66) claims that organisational evolution is not merely a self-implied process, but a "contest for survival". In other words, if organisations are to reach and potentially surpass their average life 3 expectancy range of 20 to 50 years, they need to evolve . Mergers & acquisitions seem to play a primary role in the evolution, and thus survival, of organisations.