Abstract:
Corporate sponsorship of events contributes significantly to marketing aims, including
brand awareness as measured by recall and recognition of sponsor-event
pairings. Unfortunately, resultant advantages accrue disproportionately to brands
having a natural or congruent fit with the available sponsorship properties. In three
cued-recall experiments, the effect of articulation of sponsorship fit on memory for
sponsor-event pairings is examined. While congruent sponsors have a natural
memory advantage, results demonstrate that memory improvements via articulation
are possible for incongruent sponsor-event pairings. These improvements
are, however, affected by the presence of competitor brands and the way in which
memory is accessed.