Consumers' Responses to Tie-in Brand Purchase Intention in Event Sponsorships

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to propose and empirically test a conceptual model showing the effect of consumer responses (cognitive and emotion) towards tie-in brand purchase intention in event sponsorships. Tie-in brand refers to the brand that is sponsoring any event. Consumer responses are generated towards both event and tie-in brand simultaneously as both brand and event are connected. In the model, the cognition and emotion generated by both event and brand are modeled as the major antecedents to develop consumer's hedonic experience and utilitarian value judgments that in turn direct consumer's purchase behavior towards the tie-in brand. Data were collected through structured questionnaire-based surveys from spectators aged 18 and above, at two major events held in India. Structural equation modeling was employed to validate and test the conceptual model. The study findings show that in event sponsorships spectators' cognitive and emotional responses towards both the events and the sponsoring brands play a key role in the formation of hedonic–utilitarian value judgements. The hedonic–utilitarian evaluation of event further leads to the development of affective and cognitive evaluation of the brand, which in turn predicts consumer's purchase intention towards the brand. A model showing the mechanism of spectators' cognition–affect transfer from event to sponsor brand is relatively scarce and inconclusive in the prior literature. Thus, this study is the first attempt to show how spectators' cognition–affect transfer can occur in event sponsorships, and provide the marketers with insights about the psychological process through which event sponsorship would generate spectators' purchase intentions toward the tie-in brands.