حمایت مالی و ارزش سهامداران : بررسی دوباره و توسعه

A stream of studies investigates shareholder wealth effects of marketing investments into sport sponsorship properties. While research generally upholds a positive relationship between sponsorship agreements and shareholder wealth, the relationship remains unclear for several sponsorship categories. With more specific attention to research design issues, this paper replicates and extends prior research in two of these areas: official product and Olympic sponsorship announcements. This paper notes that inclusion of observations with potentially confounding events materially affects results reported by the original authors. The first study identifies a significant positive shareholder wealth effect associated with initial official product sponsorship announcement but not for renewal of such announcements. The second study resolves conflicting views from prior research regarding Olympic sponsorships. Although a negative overall relationship exists for sponsors of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the market's negative view of costly, top-tier global sponsorships largely drives this result.

Over the past two decades, sponsorship has become a centerpiece of corporate and brand communications. In recent years, the pace of sponsorship-linked marketing expenditures has consistently outstripped that of traditional advertising, rising to an estimated $42 billion worldwide in 2008 (IEG, 2008). The growth of sponsorship is also readily apparent in the development of supporting infrastructure and policies surrounding corporate involvement in sponsorship activities (Cornwall, 2008). Sponsors now regularly employ outside agencies to assist them in areas such as proposal management, measurement, and hospitality. A recent study of Fortune 500 companies websites found one-third of these firms have made their sponsorship policy available on the Internet (Cunningham, Cornwell, & Coote, 2009). For many firms, the transformation of marketing communications through major sponsorship programs means key changes in a variety of aspects of traditional advertising and promotions, including content, media choice and placement, and the overall pattern of marketing spending (Cornwell, Weeks, & Roy, 2005). Thus, corporate sponsorship investments represent decidedly strategic managerial decisions that typically exert great influence upon many aspects of the firm's broader marketing strategy. The dramatic growth of this medium has drawn increased interest from academic researchers, resulting in a considerable literature base in recent years. Within the context of the marketing-finance interface, a number of studies assess the impact of various categories of sponsorship announcements upon changes in shareholder wealth. Overall, marketing studies tend to confirm that investors generally hold a favorable view of these investments. The evidence relating to specific types of sponsorship announcements, however, remains less than clear. For instance, Cornwell et al. (2005) are unable to identify a significant positive abnormal return for firms announcing official sponsorship status for five major U.S. sport leagues, leading them to support their hypotheses using longer event windows. Whereas Miyazaki and Morgan (2001) interpret their results as suggesting a positive financial effect for U.S. listed firms announcing sponsorship for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Farrel and Frame (1997) reach the opposite conclusion in their study of sponsors of the very same event. In conflict with the Clark, Cornwell, and Pruitt (2002) study of stadia naming rights announcements, Leeds, Leeds, and Pistolet (2007)) conclude that the purchase of naming rights had little significant impact on the short-term or long-term value of the companies that bought them. Given that the phenomena and announcement dates examined in these studies were identified using publicly available secondary data sources, these conflicting findings suggest a lack of consistency across studies in terms of research design, statistical analysis and interpretation of study results. As the usefulness of the event study technique depends heavily upon a set of rather strong assumptions (Brown and Warner, 1980 and Brown and Warner, 1985), its imprecise application may bias empirical results and subsequent conclusions (McWilliams & Siegel, 1997). Thus, inappropriate on inconsistent technique may unjustifiably support or discount some theories. This paper re-examines sponsorship hypotheses from three published studies to see if the research designs that the authors employed materially affected the conclusions they drew. These studies are: Cornwell et al.'s (2005) study of official major league sponsorship announcements; Miyazaki and Morgan's (2001) and Farrell and Frame's (1997) studies of 1996 Olympic sponsorships. In addition, for the official product sponsorship study, extending the sample frame and identifying additional announcements for each event type subsequent to the period investigated in the original study increase the ability to identify significant effects. The Olympic study uses additional analysis not carried out by either of the prior research teams to identify the basis for the negative returns.

This study replicates, extends and presents empirical tests of majorleague sports official product sponsorship and Olympic sponsorship announcements on stock prices of sponsoring firms. For the replication and extension of the previous study (Cornwell et al., 2005) on major-league sports official product sponsorship, the study obtained announcement dates from the paper, and gathered additional announcements from the previously studied leagues (MLB, NHL, NBA, NFL, and PGA), augmented with announcements from another popular sports league, NASCAR. The results of the study suggest that shareholders favorably view official major-league sports product sponsorships. However, in re-examining shareholder reaction to official sponsorship of the 1996 Olympic Games (Farrell & Frame, 1997; Miyazaki & Morgan, 2001), this study finds that shareholdersmay not value sponsorship of Olympic Games in a positive light. In Cornwell et al.'s (2005) examination of official product sponsorship announcements, investigators found no significant positive abnormal return to sponsoring firms on the announcement date (t=0) as hypothesized. By applying the suggested recommendations of McWilliams and Siegel (1997), and eliminating those events that could potentially confound returns to shareholder wealth, and reexamining by applying the same methodology employed by the authors, this study found that official product sponsorship announcements are rewarded with positive abnormal returns on the date of the announcement (Bootstrap z=2.66, mean abnormal return=1.10%), and during the event window of 0 to +2 days (Bootstrap z=2.10, mean abnormal return=1.00%). This suggests that shareholders recognize a value in official major league sponsorship announcements, and reward them with positive abnormal returns to shareholder value. This finding could provide valuable insight for sponsorship managers who are seeking to make official sports sponsorships a part of their marketing communications strategy. Table 3 presents a summary of the mean abnormal returns for the expanded sample of 112 initial official major league announcements. These announcements represent first-time sponsorship agreements between the sponsoring firm and their respective leagues. Results suggest that shareholders value these types of sponsorships withsignificant positive abnormal returns for the day after the announcement (Bootstrap z=3.01, p=0.01, mean abnormal return of 0.38%), while the day of the announcement produced positive abnormal returns that approached significance (Bootstrap z=1.90, p=0.11, mean abnormal return of 0.26%). Additionally, event windows of 0 to +1, −1 to +1, −2 to +2, and −10 to +10 all produced positive, significant mean abnormal returns, indicating further support that shareholders value initial official major league sports sponsorship agreements. A further examination of these initial sponsorship announcements by league indicates that investments in the NHL and MLB provide the strongest returns to shareholder wealth for sponsoring firms. This could be due in part to the fact that the NHL teams play 82 games a year and MLB teams play 162 games a year versus 16 games for the NFL, and NASCAR has 36 events during the season. Marketing practitioners should take note of these results and seek to invest in sponsorships that not only can provide a clear marketing communications strategy to the consumer, but should also seek to invest in sponsorships that could potentially provide more immediate financial rewards to shareholders. To further examine the influence of the context of the sponsorship announcement on the response of shareholders, this study examined official announcements in the renewal context; results appear in Table 5. Results clearly indicate that shareholders do not view renewal announcements as favorably as initial announcements, as indicated by a non-significant negative abnormal return (z=−0.28, p=0.78, mean abnormal return=−.034%) on the day of the announcement. However, the event window of −2 to −1 produced a positive abnormal return (z=1.98, p=.05, mean abnormal return=0.87%) indicating potential leakage of information prior to the announcement. Additionally, the non-significance on the announcement date suggests that shareholders may not place as great a value on existing sponsorship relationships as they do new sponsorship agreements. This topic warrants further investigation. Results of the replication of the two studies examining the 1996 Olympic Games (Farrell & Frame, 1997; Miyazaki & Morgan, 2001) appear in Tables 6 and 7. Unlike the conclusion of Miyazaki and Morgan (2001) that Olympic sponsorship could be viewed as a neutral to positive event for shareholders, this study finds that these sponsorships are almost universally negative, with the exception of the individual date of t=−4, and the event window of t=−4 to 0. These results may indicate a leakage of information prior to official announcements. Further, an examination of the different levels of Olympic sponsorship finds that those sponsors who invested in the highest level of Olympic sponsorship, The Olympic Partner program (TOP), experienced the greatest losses to shareholder value. Potential reasons for this shareholder reaction are that Olympic sponsorships are expensive and infrequent. TOP participants paid $40 million for sponsorships during the 1996 Olympic Games, and for an event as infrequent as the Olympics, shareholders could view the investment as a poor expenditure of marketing funds. By applying the suggested event-study guidelines advised by McWilliams and Siegel (1997) this study achieved results that were previously masked by confounding events surrounding the sponsorship announcement dates taken from the studies replicated here. Results of this study signify that shareholders do indeed value and reward firms that invest in official major league sports sponsorships while viewing investments in Olympic sponsorships as a poor investment. This shows that not all sponsorships are equal, and that a careful examination of the context of a sponsorship investment is critical.