Brand sponsorship effectiveness: how self-congruity, event attachment, and subjective event knowledge matters to sponsor brands

The present study aims to understand the impact of actual and ideal self-congruity with an event on spectators’ attitude and purchase intentions toward the sponsor brands. Further, the study investigates an underlying mechanism that spectators’ event attachment mediates these relationships. This is one of the first studies to investigate the impacts of consumers’ subjective knowledge on attachment with a self-congruent event and sponsorship effectiveness. Data were collected inside a live sport event stadium through a self-report questionnaire (n = 202). We used the structural equation model and Process Macro to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. Results indicated that the ideal event self-congruity significantly impacted event attachment and the sponsor brand attitude. The actual event self-congruence significantly influenced the event attachment but did not impact the sponsor brand attitude. The spectators’ event attachment and sponsor brand attitude positively mediated the impact of self-congruity on sponsor brand purchase intention. Results indicated that event self-congruity generates high (low) event attachment for participants with high (low) subjective event knowledge. The findings provide valuable insight to brand marketers on designing the marketing communication strategies to activate the ideal self-congruence of the spectators, which might enhance their attitudes toward sponsored brands and their brand purchase intentions.