Impact of Sponsorships on Customer Loyalty

Abstract

Marketers increasingly use sponsorship campaigns for their marketing activities to attract customers. Sponsoring marketing has been paid a greater attention in the current competitive business context. Marketers attejnpt to enhance brand image in customers’ mind and develop customer loyalty towards their brands by sponsoring such events. As such, the study was focused to measure the impact of sponsorships on the customer loyalty. The quantitative research approach was used to study the phenomenon. The descriptive research design was adopted for the study. The survey method was used as the main research method to conduct the study. The population of this study consists of the mobile phone subscribers in Sri Lanka who use the mobile phones service for their basic use of communications. Accordingly, the individuals who use mobile phones for the business purpose were excluded from the study. The convenience sampling method was used and sample consisted of 280 mobile phone subscribers. The study was conducted in the Southern province in Sri Lanka. The magnitude of the sponsorships was measured using the customer awareness and customer involvement towards sponsorships. Therefore, they were asked whether they were aware of the sponsorships programmes launched by respective service providers and actively participated in those programmes. The results of the study show that mobile phone subscribers have perceived that their respective service providers have higher interest towards sports, cultural, and entertainment events for the sponsorships. It shows that 250 subscribers are aware of sponsoring sports events while 88 are aware of entertainment and 34 are aware of cultural events respectively. The independent sample t- test results indicate that both customer awareness and involvement in Dialog subscribers on sponsoring events are higher than Mobitel subscribers indicating a significant difference between the two major players. However, Pearson correlation and Regression results show that there is no a significant impact of sponsorships on customer loyalty. Therefore, it could be concluded that customer awareness is not significantly impacted on enhancing customer loyalty. Customers may be aware of the sponsorships programmes and they may be interested in enjoying with them as well. However, it is important to further scrutinize whether it really contributes to enhance customer loyalty.