How to Build Successful Sponsorship Relationships: A Text Mining Approach

In today´s ultra-competitive and complicated business environment, sponsorship is a significant marketing communications strategy for building brands. And an increasing number of sponsors and sport entities refer to one another as partners. Modern sponsors now recognize the strategic role of sponsorship and the great potential for creating value from a longer-term relationship. In this study, text mining was adopted to dig the marketing-related competencies required for the success of sponsor-sport entity relationship. Source texts were collected from 2147 documents, and the models ´text extraction´ and ´association analysis´ were conducted to understand the relationships. The findings indicated that there is an imbalance between sponsors´ motives for investment and sport entities´ expectations about sponsors´ performance. So collaborative capabilities should be developed to manage the relationships, meanwhile, these two partners should try to marry their two brands in the mind of their target markets. The results also emphasized sport entities´ proactive role in sponsorship relationships.