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John Amis and Trevor Slack: School of Physical Education, Sport and Leisure, De Montfort University, Bedford, UK
Tim Berrett: Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Sport Canada for funding the research upon which this study is based.
Sport sponsorship involves the allocation of scarce resources with the intent of achieving certain organisational objectives (Slack and Bentz, 1996). Consequently, it has frequently been described in the marketing literature as a strategic activity (Carter, 1996; Gilbert, 1988; Otker, 1988). The use of recent developments in the strategic management literature to provide insights that will further our understanding of sport sponsorship, as has been the case in the wider marketing field, therefore appears logical and germane. Unfortunately, this is an avenue of research that has been largely neglected. Although the linkages with strategic management have long been recognised in marketing research (e.g. Biggadike, 1981), similar connections are conspicuously absent in the sponsorship literature. In this paper, we attempt to address this void by extending our previous arguments that sponsorship agreements should be considered as strategic investments (cf. Amis et al., 1997). Specifically, we contend that any firm entering into a sponsorship agreement should treat its sponsorship as a resource which, either singly or in combination with other resources, can be developed into an area of distinctive competence which in turn can assist the firm to a position of sustainable competitive advantage.
To this end, the remainder of the paper is divided into six sections. In the first of these we argue that sport sponsorship should be considered a resource which can be the basis of competitive advantage. In the next section we present arguments to suggest that for this advantage to be sustainable, the sponsorship must be developed into a distinctive competence. We then go on to outline how data about the sponsorship activities of 28 Canadian national and multinational companies were collected. Next we provide case illustrations of four companies which were successful with their sponsorships, and four which were not. These data are then analysed to demonstrate that the companies which were successful developed this aspect of their operations into a distinctive competence, while those which failed did not. We...