Sport Brand Sponsorship of Malaysia Football Team

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

RESEARCH BACKGROUND

The sports sponsorship stands for exchanging a relationship between sports organizations and other mediators. It is another format of advertising and which creates new form of advertising champion that is other from the traditional one. The principal of companies become sponsors is to maximize rewards and minimize risks (Papadimitriou, et al., 2008). This developing scenario has provided opportunities to western firms who want to expend their customer base in increasingly affluent Asian markets (Rowe and Gilmour, 2010). In other words, the sports sponsorship is the provision of resources (money, people or equipment) by the organization directly to an event activity in exchange for a direct association to the event or activity (Sandier & Shani,1993). The sponsorship literature has been dominated by studies focusing on the role and importance of factors (such as congruence, or the fit between a brand and sponsored property), that determine whether a sponsor and property should be matcher together (e.g., Fleck & Quester, 2007).

Sponsorship is able to upset the weakness of other marketing tools, such as advertisements and sales promotion due to numbers of its attributes (Erdogan& Kitchen, 1998), which have leaded to sponsorship become a key marketing tool. Sponsorship offers a highly awareness to consumers. It is having a broad cross section ability to attract the community to reach a specific niche. Sponsorship is also a protection strategy including pre-event education and public relation initiatives. Sport sponsorship provides a more convenient way to exposure companies' brands and products in the media. Sponsorship also has an ability fulfill and satisfy a board range of objectives at both corporate and brand level (Stipp&Schiavone, 1996). 2012 Turnkey intelligence sponsor inventory study of fans at Solder Field, during the 2012 Chicago Bears season, found that having multiple points of engagements with sponsors increased the likelihood of sponsor recall (Seiferheld, 2013).

As for academic interests and the increasingly amount of investment from sponsors in sports events. There are many researches and studies have found and the benefits brought from sponsorship including:

1. Building stronger brands through image transfer between sponsored properties and sponsoring firm (Gwinner, 1997).
2. Improving consumer goodwill towards the sponsor brand (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000)
3. Achievement on marketing objectives such as raise in sales revenue can 1998.
4. The ability to enable the effective targeting of narrow sections of consumers (Mansourpour, 2007)
5. Generating an additional product value to consumer (Berrett& Amis, 1999)

Brand is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other entity (Jalled, Donovan, Giles-Corti, D'Arcy, & Holman, 2000). From the perspective of the sponsorship brand, research has consistently shown that investing in sponsorship can effect brand awareness (Levin, Joiner, & Cameron, 2001), brand image (Gwinner& Eaton, 1999), brand loyalty (Levin, Beasley, & Gamble, 2004), and a firm's financial performance (Elberse&Verluen, 2012; Miyazaki & Morgan, 2001). Strong brands help the firm establish an identity in the market, less vulnerability to competitive actions and larger margin. A high brand image implies that consumers have a lot of positive feedback on the brand. For example Nike brand is having a high value compared with other sports equipment brands, even though the quality of other brands' products is same as Nike.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Investigate the effects of planned behavior and social identity of the sponsors who have been supported and sponsored the Kedah FA Football. The audiences of sport events, called sports fans, are also a major factor of a successful sport sponsorship. In the previous studies, we also found that the brand loyalty and attitude towards the brand sponsorship were the important elements to facilitate a company to sponsor any sports event (Jacoby &Chesnut, 1987). There examples illustrate an evolving sponsorship space, where companies are seeking to build deep emotional connections that engage and encourage interaction between the sponsor, the athletic event, and the fan (Forbes, 2015). In order to developed a well targeted marking strategy it is necessary to understand how sports sponsorship attracted the consumers and how it maintained or added on additional value to their lives. Therefore attitudes of sports fans toward brand, brand loyalty, brand reputation, purchase intention and also other major factors were considered in this study.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES.

According the Aaker (1997), sports sponsorship was focused on hypothetical knowledge of its consumers' attitude and purchase intention on the event through of the research in literature. In this research there were two distinct objectives achieved through a thorough review of the available literatures on sports sponsorship. These major objectives obtained from preliminary researches are as followings:

1. To identify the effects of attitude toward the brand and the elements of the theory of planned behavior (subjective norm, perceived behavior) on consumer outcomes on Kedah FA fans.

2. To discriminate direct effect and indirect effects of social identity on consumers' behavioral intention.

THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this research was to identify the effects of attitude toward the brand and the elements of the planned behaviour. Direct effect and indirect effects of social identity on consumers' behavioral intention to sport brand sponsorship of Kedah FA. Sports sponsorships provide corporate sponsors with a myriad of benefits that can be used to promote a company's products and services (Faircloth, Capella, & Alford, 2001; Pope, 2001). Sport sponsorship is the most popular and lucrative form (IEG, 2015)

SIGNIFICANCE

This study will help to find out sport brand sponsorship of Malaysia football team based on planned bahavior and social identity as.

1. The sports sponsorship will influence Kedah FA.
2. Sponsor that fits your event and its target audience – make it a relevant sponsor. This ultimately reinforces each brand's image.
3. Body of knowledge : Sponsorship

DELIMITATION

Delimitation define the scope of the study. That is, they set the boundaries of the study. Normally under control of the research. Example include. Focus to Kedah FA, this topic only focus to Kedah FA fans in Stadium Kedah Darul Aman. Second delimitation is the questionnaire that are given to Kedah FA fans.

LIMITATION

In this section you need to discuss the restriction or drawback of you study with respect to aspects such as. Firstly the questionnaire only give before start game, before game starts questionnaire will be given to all fans and collects the questionnaire after they answered the question. Second limitation is the questionnaire can give only in Stadium Darul Aman.

ASSUMPTION

The following assumptions were considered in the conduct of the study:

1. The attendant of sport visitor can influence the image of sponsorship
2. The awareness about sponsorship

RESEARCH METHOD.

The major goal of this study is to uncover the effect of sport sponsorship that had made successful sport events and how the sponsors present their brands to attract their consumers. In this research Malaysian football fans the following analysis techniques were used to evaluate the effects on social identity and planned behavior.

1. Descriptive Statistic
2. Factor analysis
3. Canonical Correlation Analysis.

RESEARCH FLOW.

This research proposal here three chapters and each chapter contained a summary. The first chapter concentrated on the research background, motivation, methods, procedure and the structure. The second chapter studied and reviewed the pervious literatures on sports sponsorship, consumers' attitude toward the brand, theory of planned behavior theory and brand loyalty. At the end of this chapter, the research conducted hypotheses to amalgamate the result of the previous study. The third chapter constructed measurements, research design, collecting multivariate techniques and sample collecting procedures.

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

At the beginning of this chapter, definitions and literatures on each type of sponsorships were reviewed and followed by the histories and literatures on the most worldwide sports events and tournaments. Finally, the theory of each variable and factor in this search were be studied and reviewed. This chapter, literature review helped to explain the needs for this research.

The Malaysia national football team is the national association football team of Malaysia and is controlled by the Football Association of Malaysia. Malaysia national football team is recognized by FIFA as the successor of the defunct Malaya national football team and the national team was founded in 1963 Merdeka Tournament one month before the establishment of the Malaysian Federation. In the FIFA World Rankings, Malaysia's highest standing was in the first release of the figures, in August 1993, at 75th. Malaysia's main rival on the international stage are their geographical neighbors, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore, and past matches between these three teams have produced much drama.

SPONSORSHIP

According to Cornwell and Maigan (1998), sponsorship involves in two activities:

1. An exchange between sponsor and event property occurs whereby the event property receives compensation like right free and correlate in the event.
2. Sponsor leverages the association by developing marketing activities to communicate the sponsorship.

While there are multiple definitions of sponsorship (Cornwell, 2011), Ukman (2015) defines sponsorship as a relationship in which a cash and/or in-kind fee is paid to a sport organization or event in return for access to the exploitable commercial potential associated with that organization or event.

The sponsorship definition is a business relationship between a provider of funds, resources or services and an individual event or organization (Busby & Digby, 2002). Sponsorship is not exclusive to the sports industry; however, sponsors heavily invest money in sporting events because the events are perceived as having a good public acceptance, a strong fan following and a newsworthy event for all forms of media coverage (Mullin et al., 2014). It is a form of advertising in which an organization provides funds for something such as television program or sports event in return for exposure to a target audience.

Sponsorship can essentially be used as a propaganda (Cornwell, 2004). It is able to influence consumers' value and image of the brand gradually through its exposures (Stephen & Daniel, 1999). While sponsorship can share similar goals as advertisement such as an increase in revenue (Vakratsas & Ambler, 1999; Zafer & Kitchen, 1998; Nickell, Cornwell, & Johnston, 2011), sponsorship is defined differently from an advertisement. Because of that sports sponsorship is a useful tool to deliver a higher value of the brand to the target customers and sophisticated audiences who may display much skepticism towards advertisers, without irritating them and losing their attention (Phili & Kitchean, 1998).

SPORTS SPONSORSHIP

The growing interest of people in professional sports worldwide has more contributed to sports event. Sports industry becomes one of the biggest industries in worldwide in past years and has been growing rapidly. Sport sponsorship is not a new phenomenon (Shannon, 1999). Back in the ancient games in Rome, sport sponsorship was sponsored by the roman patriarch, the purpose is to create public appearance (Hiller, 2000). By marketing through sport or entertainment, sponsors hope to reach their target marked through their lifestyles (Mullin, Hardy, & Sutton, 2014. Modern form of sports sponsorship is developed by the United Stated in the twenty century when they sponsors first fitness program (Gardner & Shuman, 1987). Sports sponsorship is a one asset in cash or a kind of sports related activity, a person or event in return for accessing to the exploitable commercial potential linked with sports (Farrely, Quester, & Burton, 1997). Sponsorship is not exclusive to the sport industry; however, sponsors heavily invest money in sporting events because the events are perceived as having good public acceptance, a strong fan following and a newsworthy event for all forms of media coverage (Mullin et al, 2014).

Title Sponsor

The firms frequently advertise their company names, brands and products in the stadium tournaments. Their name shows as a title sponsor in the events which they support. For example, the Spirit Mountain Casino Rodeo Classic as a title sponsor made the tournament identified name and logo of the company.

Presenting Sponsoring

Presenting sponsoring is sponsor that pays only a quarter of royalty cost than the "nominal sponsor" (Lamont & Dowell, 2008). Presenting sponsor corresponding advertising exposures perspective and exposure to peripheral-event signage (e.g. location-based, Scoreboard and uniform sponsor identification) and computer-generated graphics made for the tournament (Cornwell, Weeks, & Roy, 2005). Presenting sponsors also receive some benefits from the sponsored events but with limitation.

Official Sponsor

Official sponsor is similar to nominal sponsor; however they have the right to determine who can be the sponsors of the event. Official sponsor has to buy an authority from the tournament association to become a main distributor on the event and in addition to one??”tenth of the royalty fee from sponsors that charged by office sponsor goes to the tournament association. On the other hand, official sponsor has the right to refuse their competitors to support the events. For example, Adidas is an official sponsor of FIFA World Cup; hence he can prohibit Nike to become a sponsor.

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