Ambush Marketing

Monitoring sponsorship effectiveness is gaining more and more importance since firms are increasingly taking advantage of supporting large sports events, cultural institutions and events as well as charitable causes as means of marketing communication.

However, especially in the field of sports sponsoring, traditional sponsorship is becoming increasingly threatened by creative ambush marketers seeking to position themselves as official sponsors without, however, paying license fees. As ambush campaigns are increasingly operating in a legal grey area, our studies in the context of the UEFA European Football Championship of 2012, the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Football in 2011 and the FIFA Football World's Cup 2014 in Brasil aim at analyzing whether official event sponsors perform superior than ambush marketers and national team sponsors in terms of brand preference. Data from our field experiments compare print advertisements and TV commercials in terms of consumer’s notion of sponsorship and ambush marketers. The results suggest that consumers cannot identify ambush marketers, event and team sponsors correctly. At the moment, the data is being processed further in order to analyze complex mediated and moderated effects of word-of-mouth referral, brand preference, knowledge about and attitude towards ambush marketing as well as brand preference.