Does sponsorship work in the same way in different sponsorship contexts?

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive model of high‐level sponsorship effects that works well in both sports and cultural sponsorship contexts.

The sponsorship model is tested using survey data from target market representative samples in two professional sports contexts and two cultural contexts.

The model works almost equally well in both contexts. Furthermore, a more parsimonious mediated effects model provides virtually the same results as the full model. Improving attitude towards the sponsorship and object equity are found to be the most important factors for improving sponsor equity. The model also confirms earlier research on the importance of sponsor sincerity and sponsor‐object fit in determining sponsorship effects.

The explained variance of the sincerity and object equity constructs was not as high as for other constructs in the model.

Sponsorship managers should pre‐test potential objects and sponsorship communications to make sure that constructs in the model such as fit, sincerity, sponsorship attitudes, and object equity are maximised to provide optimal sponsor equity.

The model combines constructs from various literatures into a comprehensive model of high‐level sponsorship effects. Furthermore, while most previous sponsorship research has used convenience samples and/or fictional and/or single sponsorship contexts, the comprehensive model tested here is shown to have high external validity by its consistently good performance in predicting sponsorship effects using four real sponsorships and representative samples.