Sponsors Courting Tennis Fans: Visual Processing and Need for Cognition in Evaluating Event Sponsorship

Given that sporting events are heavily tied to sponsorship, it is crucial to understand how sponsorship works from visual processing and cognition perspectives. In itself, sponsorship is not necessarily a visual tool; it is the on-site leveraging of sponsorship that is often visual for event attendees and what the authors investigate at a professional tennis event. Leveraging title sponsorships with the sponsor’s logo and product displays at the event are industry practice at professional sporting events. Visual reinforcement is important in visual processing because an event attendee actively or passively sees who the sponsor is without necessarily thinking about the event sponsorship. Need for cognition is a personality variable in psychology that reflects the extent and the effort in which consumers engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities. Attendees may interpret a sponsorship according to its “shallow meaning” without relative effort, unless they have reason to elaborate further and consider other inputs to judgment. The authors take a multi-method approach to examine the posited relationships of their model. First, for a consumer perspective, the hypotheses are tested with consumer survey data of 185 attendees drawn from a weeklong women’s professional tennis event. A luxury automobile brand served as the event’s title sponsor and used visual placement throughout the context of the event, including at the heart of action (e.g., logo in the net, product display at the event). Empirical support for the hypothesized model demonstrates that individual differences in visual processing and need for cognition play significant roles in how an attendee perceives the title sponsor’s products. Overall findings also show how attendees who rate the event as a high quality event have a more positive attitude toward the title sponsor’s featured products. That relationship is moderated by visual processing style; that is, visual processors show an especially strong link from event quality to enhanced attitude. Further, attendees who are high in need for cognition are more likely evaluate a non-endemic title sponsor as fitting with the event, plausibly because they tend to elaborate, or think about how the two fit more so than attendees who are lower in need for cognition. After testing the model with consumer data drawn at the tennis event, the authors then conducted a qualitative study to better understand how the findings resonate with practitioners, and to gain additional managerial insights. Thus, the authors interviewed a dozen managers, who worked with venues or sponsors to leverage the visual communication and create an engaging consumer experience for attendees, collectively representing marketing expertise in tennis, baseball, hockey, running and basketball. The managers discussed the findings in terms of how they do or will implement them in their respective professional sport. The results provide managers with new insights for understanding the role of individual differences in visual processing and need for cognition play in effective sponsorship and sports marketing. The findings reveal how the manner in which event attendees visualize and think relates to their assessment of a sporting event and sponsor. Individuals who tend to be more visual and think things through fully will positively influence their level of appreciation for the sporting event’s sponsors. Thus, given that many people are visual processors, event venues and sponsors alike should incorporate strategically placed visual elements such as logos at the epicenter of action in sporting events, such as near goals, backboards, bases, nets and other places where spectators tend to look in order to improve the likelihood that they visually process the event sponsor.