Sponsoring FIFA World Cup vs. Olympic Games: Coca Cola, a Classic American Brand, and Its Explicit and Implicit Sponsoring Success at Worldwide Sports Events

Sport sponsorship is supposed to be one of the most effective means in the marketing communication mix. In particular, sponsoring worldwide events such as the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup is of great interest for major brands such as Coca Cola in order to improve their global brand performance (e.g., brand equity). Although vast research has been done to explore the various facets of sponsoring success, literature lacks two important aspects: First, most research relies on explicit indicators (mostly verbal) to measure sponsoring effectiveness, denying the fact that most experiences occur unconsciously and cannot be expressed verbally by participants of an event. Second, the vast majority of studies do not take into account how visible the brand of a sponsor is at the sport event itself—the FIFA World Cup, e.g., prominently presents all major sponsors during each soccer game, whereas the Olympic Games do not allow any sponsor mentioning during all of the Olympic contests. Therefore, the goal of this chapter was to examine the explicit and implicit effect of a visible versus a non-visible sport sponsorship before and after two major sport events. Moreover, Coca Cola was chosen as one of the most active brands sponsoring major sport events such as FIFA World Cup or Olympic Games. In detail, two studies were run in order to test the effectiveness of the respective sponsorship activities on brand-related motivation. Our results suggest that a visible sport sponsorship of Coca Cola during a sport event has much greater influence on explicit and implicit brand-related motivation associations toward Coca Cola compared to non-visible sport sponsorship. In addition, the results show that it is of great importance to measure sponsoring success on both an implicit and explicit level in order to identify all relevant association facets in their full complexity.