Promotional value of motorsport


Sports. Broad variety of them depending on a sport field, equipment or for example expenditures. If
we sort them according to costs, one of those costly will definitely be motorsport(s) as it usually
takes substantial amounts of money to participate. Taking closer look at rallysport, it takes about
lesser tens of thousands of CZK just to participate in lower tier championship in a vehicle of some
entry-level category. And with more powerful machinery and more prestigious championships it gets
more and more expensive and for example to participate in a whole season of European Rally
Championship you need several millions of CZK.

And it is not only participating, even organising a rally event is quite costly, according to
organisers of Barum Czech Rally Zlín (we must have in mind that this is the longest, the toughest
and the most prestigious rally event in CZ) it took lower tens of millions of CZK to run the event.
And you have to get [DEL: these :DEL] [INS: this :INS] money annually as this rally is held each
year. As an organiser of such an event you face a problem, where to get all that funds. Here comes
the commercial sponsoring which is (with smaller or bigger exception of public subsidies) one of a
few ways for organisers how to fill the budget.

When we are speaking about sponsoring, we have to bear in mind, that commercial sponsoring, as
Ulkman (1995) says has one key difference from philantrophy, as the [DEL: the :DEL] goal of
commercial sponsor is to seek some kind of commercial incentive and sponsoring also aims on various
commercial objectives such as promoting some brand, spreading knowledge of some product, etc. Thus
sport (in this example rallying event) works as a promotional vehicle for commercial sponsor and
its interests and this relationship is becoming more and more interrelated as new forms of
cooperation between event and sponsor emerges (Whitson, 1998).

How efficient this promotion of brand via commercial sponsoring will be is still influenced by
various factors but one of the most important is fit in with what is sponsored[INS: . :INS] Rifon
et. al. (2004) found out that congruence between sponsor and event plays very important role and
people see sponsors with higher level of congruence as more altruist and more credible. Another
important factor is level of involvement of each individual as was [DEL: said :DEL] [INS: stressed
:INS] by Koo & Lee (2019) and the more involved fan is the higher probability that he would be
aware of sponsor ´s brand and also there is bigger chance that he would buy sponsor´s products.

This whole issue of sponsoring, promotion of brand etc. could be effectively studied via levels of
brands awareness of sponsors and this could be done in two ways. First approach is to study brand
recall, which is two step memory process when individual has to retrieve brand from memory without
any given aid whereas brand recall consists just of checking out brands which respondent links with
event.  Both approaches are valid for testing respondent memory of brands but naturally there is
higher number of enumerated sponsors in brand recall as you don´t have to retrieve brand from
memory (Walch, Kim & Ross, 2008).

If we look into previous researches in this field connected with motorsport, there would be just a
handful of results as there were a few studies focused od NASCAR which were researching role of
commercial sponsoring of this series onto brand loyalty and another studies were focused on Formula
One and its impact on brand promotion. This kind of research in rallysport is rare and one of a few
works is book by Naess (2014) which in several chapters studies role of rallysport on promoting
hosting countries of each rally and also role of this sport on building image of car manufacturer
and its cars.

To be continued [reviewer21] with methodology and results but those are yet to be written…

References

KOO, Jakeun a Younghan LEE, 2019. Sponsor-event congruence effects: The moderating role of sport
involvement and mediating role of sponsor attitudes. Sport Management Review [online]. 22(2),
222-234 [cit. 2019-04-21]. DOI: 10.1016/j.smr.2018.03.001. ISSN 14413523.

NAESS, Hans Erik, 2014. A Sociology of the World Rally Championship. 1. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN 978-1-349-48771-4.

RIFON, Nora J., Sejung Marina CHOI, Carrie S. TRIMBLE a Hairong LI, 2004. Congruence Effects in
Sponsorship: The Mediating Role of Sponsor Credibility and Consumer Attributions of Sponsor
Motive. Journal of Advertising. 33(1), 29-42. DOI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4189244.

ULKMAN, L., 2017. The IEG’s complete guide to sponsorship: Everything you need to know about
sports, arts, event, entertainment and cause marketing. Chicago: IEG. ISBN 0-944807-74-7.

WALSH, Patrick, Yongjae KIM a Stephen D. ROSS, 2008. Brand Recall and Recognition: A Comparison of
Television and Sport Video Games as Presentation Modes. Sport Marketing Quarterly. 17(4), 201-208.

WHITSON, David, 1998. Circuits of Promotion: Media, Marketing and the Globalization of
Sport. Mediasport. New York: Routledge, s. 55-73. ISBN 0415140412.

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 [reviewer21]Very good and well structured introduction. However, I miss one important issue – what
is/are the research questions? What is the main goal of your dessertation and how do you want to
achieve it?