One of the major challenges facing cricket unions today is getting adequate
funding; on the other hand, one of the challenges facing businesses are the
hundreds of unsolicited sponsorship proposals they receive annually. This study
investigated the business decision-making process for selecting sponsorship
proposals, specifically to contribute to the cricket unions’ understanding of the
formal selection process that the sponsorship proposal goes through.
The primary objective of the study was to determine the degree to which
businesses follow the decision-making process when selecting a sponsorship
opportunity. The research study was based on a descriptive research design.
First, a theoretical discussion of sponsorship within the marketing communication
mix was conducted to illustrate that a sponsorship is a product that the business
must purchase, and therefore they use the decision-making process to choose
among different sponsorship opportunities. The business decision-making process
was discussed in further detail for selecting sponsorship proposals.
Primary data was collected by means of a web-based questionnaire. A
convenience sample was used to distribute the questionnaire to sponsors of the
sixteen cricket unions in South Africa. The nature of a sponsorship relationship is
rather sensitive; therefore a complete list of all the sponsors could not be
compiled. A total of 39 respondents participated in the study. The sample was not
representative, and therefore the results are only valid for those respondents who
participated in the study.
The results indicated that respondents were most likely to set
product/brand/service objectives and media objectives for their sponsorships. All
the sponsorship objectives are equally important to the respondents from the
medium and large sponsors, except for guest hospitality objectives which are
deemed more important by large sponsors than the respondents from medium
sponsors. With regard to decision-making criteria, respondents found
positioning/image criteria as very important during a sponsorship decision. The
role-players identified by the respondents who most frequently participate in the decision-making process are the marketing manager, public relations manager,
CEO or owner. With regard to the degree to which businesses follow the decisionmaking
process, it was found that large sponsors are more likely to follow a fairly
formal evaluation process than medium sponsors.
It is recommended that cricket unions need to focus on the decision-making
criteria and objectives that are deemed important by sponsors, and that they
should also include these aspects in their sponsorship proposals. With regard to
medium and large sponsors, cricket unions should focus on providing large
sponsors with more guest hospitality opportunities; they must also prepare their
proposals for a formal decision-making process as compared the less formal
approach followed by medium sponsors when reviewing sponsorship applications.
Recommendations for future research include that a similar study should be
conducted with a large sample size, to be able to identify if statistical significant
differences do exist for different size sponsors. A probability sample should be
used, to be able to obtain data that is representative of the entire population. The
limitations of the study, such as financial and time constraints, prevented from
achieving all the recommendations for future research set out above. / Thesis (M.Com. (Marketing Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NWUBOLOKA1/oai:dspace.nwu.ac.za:10394/11070 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Coetzee, Alida Johanna |
| Source Sets | North-West University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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