Optimizing the leveraging of an Olympic sponsorship with composite logos: the impact of the type of composite logos on the strength of the sponsor-sponsee association and on the perceived sponsor’s brand image. A Bridgestone case study.

Details

Supervisors

Thierry Jupsin

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Sponsorship is recognized as one of today’s major marketing tools (Chao, 2011) and across all sponsored entities, the Olympic Games are among the most attractive ones (Papadimitriou & Apostolopoulou, 2009). The event of the Olympic Games commands the attention of the media and the entire world for two weeks every other year and reaches billions of people worldwide. This is the reason why it is considered as “the most effective international corporate marketing platform in the world” (Schmitz, 2005, p. 203). Every brand wants to participate in the intense marketing blitz that accompanies the Games, however only the official Olympic sponsors have the rights to associate their brands with Olympic imagery. This powerful differentiator can be leveraged by creating composite logos displaying the brand’s logo next to the Olympic logos. Once the two entities are associated in the consumer’s mind, the sponsor can enjoy the consequent benefits of the sponsorship (Biscaia & Rocha, 2018). So far, sponsorship research has been focused on investigating the objectives of sponsors, the impact of sponsorship on brands and the evaluation of sponsorship effectiveness (Papadimitriou & Apostolopoulou, 2009). Many studies have proven the efficiency of this marketing strategy but, nothing is known, up to our knowledge, on the impact of the type of composite logos on the strength of the sponsor-sponsee association and on the perceived sponsor’s brand image. Therefore, in this project master thesis, we investigate this gap in the literature by studying three types of composite logos used by Bridgestone in the context of its sponsorship program with the Olympic games, and their impact on two sponsorship responses. This research also contributes to practice by providing Bridgestone with insights on the composite logos it uses in its communications. So far, Bridgestone was using interchangeably the three types of composite logos with no fact-based process behind their decisions. After three years as a worldwide Olympic partner and with the Tokyo Games approaching, Bridgestone aims to understand the characteristics attached to its composite logos and their efficiency on the strength of the association of Bridgestone with the Olympic Games and the perception of Bridgestone’s brand image. This question was raised by the brand activation team, responsible for the leveraging of the Olympic partnership of Bridgestone, during an internship at the headquarters of Bridgestone EMIA (region including Europe, Middle East, CIS, India, and Africa). Based on this managerial question and the literature review, we raised the hypotheses that the type of composite logo would influence the strength of the sponsor-sponsee association and the perceived sponsor’s brand image. This was founded on the managerial belief, itself supported by previous literature, that the three types of composite logos would have distinct meanings in the consumers’ minds because of the different characteristics these logos display in terms of perceived localness (vs globalness), concreteness (vs abstractness), simplicity (vs complexity) and national pride triggered. This constituted our model which we have tested on a total sample of over 3,000 respondents in 6 countries, by randomly showing each respondent one of the three types of composite logos. Contrary to our hypotheses, the results do not support a direct impact of the type of logo on the two sponsorship responses. However, the three types of logos significantly differ on some of the characteristics studied and those impact the two sponsorship responses. Managerial implications of these findings are discussed.