The Impact of Strategic Alignment in Sponsorships: A Women's Sports Perspective

Abstract

Sports sponsorships continue to serve as an integral marketing tool that allows brands to reach massive audiences and accomplish a range of objectives. A large stream of academia is dedicated to investigating sponsorship effects, but most research is viewed through the lens of men’s sports. As such, there is a lack of understanding about sponsorship optimization within women’s sports, which is particularly problematic considering the exponential growth in participation and viewership in these contexts. Moreover, fans of women’s sports represent a unique audience in that a distinct motivation of fandom includes supporting women’s opportunities in sports, which is absent from male counterparts. Thus, quantitative research was conducted to uncover how the degree of strategic alignment between a sponsor and sponsee influences outcomes of a sponsorship in women’s professional sports in the United States. The research investigated how gender, fan identification, perceptions of fit, and perceived goodwill affect attitudinal outcomes towards a sponsorship. The study involved a survey about a fictitious partnership between the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and a genderneutral versus women-oriented sponsor category. Respondents were conditioned with one of the two sponsors and asked a series of questions to gauge if identification, evaluations, and attitudes towards a sponsorship differed based on the sponsor’s strategic alignment with NWSL. Survey data was then analyzed using structural equation modeling techniques. Ultimately, the degree of strategic alignment between partners influences sponsorship outcomes in women’s sports. The women-oriented sponsor cited higher evaluations and attitudes among both men and women compared to the gender-neutral sponsor. Moreover, while fan identification does a poor job at directly explaining attitudes towards a sponsorship, perceptions of fit and goodwill are stronger predictors of attitudinal outcomes. As such, brand managers seeking to enter the growing women’s professional sports market should recognize that a higher degree of strategic alignment can positively dictate sponsorship outcomes within these settings.