In recent years there has been considerable growth in research concerned with commercial sponsorship and its effects. A range of conceptual and theory-guided models have been proposed, established psychological theories applied, and several construct level phenomena described, in an effort to explain the way sponsorship works and how it might impact audiences. The current research consolidates and adds to this literature by outlining how an item and relational information framework (Einstein & Hunt, 1980; Hunt & Einstein, 1981) can be used to explain the cognitive processes involved when consumer audiences encounter commercial sponsorship communications. Item information can be described as that which is processed in an individual’s mind when seemingly unrelated entities are encountered, while relational information is that which is processed when seemingly related entities are encountered. These cognitive processes are assumed to be relatively automatic, and hence not under the conscious control of the individual. Item information is useful in that it promotes item salience and distinctiveness, and assists memory retrieval by enhancing item discriminability. Relational information is useful in that it promotes associative relationships between items, and assists memory retrieval by enabling one item to serve as a cue for other related items. Any given set of items will initially be encoded predominantly as either item or relational information based on apparent similarities or dissimilarities, but optimal memory performance occurs when additional encoding is encouraged by also orienting people toward the processing of the alternative form of information. In the context of sponsorship, it is proposed that brand-event relationships which are perceived as incongruent (e.g., an electronics brands sponsoring an equestrian event) will be processed most naturally in people’s minds as item information, while those which are perceived as congruent (e.g., a swimwear brand sponsoring a swimming event) will be processed most naturally as relational information. Accordingly, memory for incongruent sponsorships should be facilitated if people are encouraged to process additional brand-event relational information, and memory for congruent sponsorships should be facilitated if people are encouraged to process additional brand-specific item information. Conceptualising sponsorship within an item and relational information framework provides an explanation for a range of findings from previous sponsorship research, such as that congruent sponsorships are better remembered than incongruent sponsorships (see Cornwell, Weeks, & Roy, 2005), that the provision of information linking unrelated sponsors and events together can enhance subsequent memory for the pairing (Cornwell, Humphreys, Maguire, Weeks, & Tellegen, 2006; Simmons & Becker-Olsen, 2006), and that people often tend to be biased toward attributing sponsorships to those brands that most obviously relate to an event, and to those brands that are prominent in the marketplace (Johar & Pham, 1999; Pham & Johar, 2001). Two sets of experiments are reported. Experimental Set One is composed of five cued recall experiments and assesses the applicability of using an item and relational information framework with respect to awareness related sponsorship outcomes. In addition to manipulating brand-event congruence and type of supplementary sponsor information within each experiment, direction of cueing (event cue with brand target, brand cue with event target), competitor brand presence, and type of competitor brand information are manipulated across experiments. This set of experiments demonstrates general support for using an item and relational information framework in sponsorship; congruence effects are consistently found, relational information is shown to facilitate both brand recall and event recall, and item information is shown to facilitate brand recall when competitor brands are not present in the sponsorship context. An unintended item information manipulation also demonstrates the value of providing event-contextualised brand-specific item information. Relational information is shown to increase erroneous recall (in the form of incorrect intrusions from other brands, and recall of events to competitor brands) while item information appears to help limit erroneous recall. The findings fall short of fitting entirely within an item and relational information framework in that differential sponsor information effects for each level of brand-event congruence are not observed in every experiment, and in that the intended item information manipulation does not consistently facilitate cued recall performance. These shortcomings however, provide insight into basic item and relational information ideas when elaborate stimuli are employed, and when cued recall is used as the dependent measure. The results additionally demonstrate that cueing direction is an important influence which should be considered when evaluating sponsorship awareness effects. Further, it is shown that competitor presence in the sponsorship environment may not impact overall levels of correct recall for sponsors and events, although competitor presence may increase incorrect recall of non-sponsor brands to event cues, and recall of events to non-sponsor brand cues. Experimental Set Two is composed of two experiments and was designed to determine if and how the item and relational information framework might generalise to non-awareness related sponsorship outcomes (namely attitude toward the brand and brand purchase intent). Here again, brand-event congruence and type of supplementary sponsor information are manipulated within each experiment, and competitor brand presence is manipulated across experiments. Results show that the item and relational information framework is not directly generalisable to predicting non-awareness related sponsorship outcomes, but that it does provide value by highlighting the need to consider differences in the types of communications sponsors employ (especially when seeking to promote the brand-event relationship using relational information). The experiments demonstrate that sponsors tend to fare better than competitors regardless of whether the competitor is named in the context of the sponsorship, and that brand-event congruence makes no overall difference to attitudinal and purchase intent ratings (in contrast to what is often reported in the literature). Additionally, the results suggest that attitudinal and purchase intent sponsorship outcomes may potentially be moderated by inferred sponsor motives and mediated by perceptions of sponsorship exploitation (derived from the presence of competitors in the sponsorship environment). These suggestions are however more speculative. The research adds to the sponsorship literature by providing an explanation of the possible cognitive processes involved when people encounter commercial sponsorship communications, most specifically with respect to awareness related sponsorship outcomes. It additionally demonstrates that sponsorship can be a useful applied context in which theoretical memory ideas can be tested and refined. That is, sponsorship offers an alternative to using single word and word pair stimuli in memory research, where manipulation of important variables is nonetheless possible, and where presentation of stimuli can be both incidental and intentional. Future research directions for an item and relational information framework as applied to sponsorship are suggested, together with research aimed at further testing basic item and relational information ideas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/252448 |
| Creators | Clinton Sidney Weeks |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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