NEW YORK: Advertisement typicality, or the extent to which a message is a “good example” of an ad in a given category, may help brands make an impact with their communications around sports sponsorship, a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) has argued.
The study, entitled A Longitudinal Experiment in Advertisement Typicality: Can Sponsors Transfer the Image of a Sporting Event to Their Brand?, involved two pretests, a repeated-measures experiment, and 2,200 respondents.
And its main conclusion was that “sponsorship can transfer event associations to brands and that the level of advertisement typicality is a key driver of event-image transfer”.
The authors of the study were Marc Mazodier (Zayed University/Dubai and Kedge Business School), Armando Maria Corsi (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute For Marketing Science, University of South Australia) and Pascale G. Quester (University of Adelaide).
Previous research, they pointed out, indicated it might be best for products and communication messages to be less typical, “because unexpected elements can lead to more overall processing of the advertising content as viewers attempt to make sense of the entirety of the information”.
The new results, however, demonstrate that “event associations were transferred only when the event-related ads, which communicated the association between the event and the brand – either explicitly or implicitly – were highly typical of the event.
“Because restricted event elements, such as its logo or tagline, intrinsically improve the perceived typicality of an advertisement, official sponsors may indeed enjoy an edge.”
The three academics contended that their analysis “provides practical guidance for marketers seeking to achieve image transfers from an event to their brand”.
More specifically, they argued that to “enhance image transfer, they should increase the typicality of their advertisements by including representative elements of the event, such as an athlete competing or a symbol of the city hosting the event”.
“For some brands,” the scholars continued, “the cost of becoming an official sponsor now can be seen as a direct investment in advertisement typicality, because the status of official sponsors captures the benefits of typicality-inducing advertising elements, which are key to the delivery of the image transfer they seek.”
The advertising typicality paper appears as part of a What We Know About Sports Sponsorships section of the Journal of Advertising Research.
The study, entitled A Longitudinal Experiment in Advertisement Typicality: Can Sponsors Transfer the Image of a Sporting Event to Their Brand?, involved two pretests, a repeated-measures experiment, and 2,200 respondents.
And its main conclusion was that “sponsorship can transfer event associations to brands and that the level of advertisement typicality is a key driver of event-image transfer”.
The authors of the study were Marc Mazodier (Zayed University/Dubai and Kedge Business School), Armando Maria Corsi (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute For Marketing Science, University of South Australia) and Pascale G. Quester (University of Adelaide).
Previous research, they pointed out, indicated it might be best for products and communication messages to be less typical, “because unexpected elements can lead to more overall processing of the advertising content as viewers attempt to make sense of the entirety of the information”.
The new results, however, demonstrate that “event associations were transferred only when the event-related ads, which communicated the association between the event and the brand – either explicitly or implicitly – were highly typical of the event.
“Because restricted event elements, such as its logo or tagline, intrinsically improve the perceived typicality of an advertisement, official sponsors may indeed enjoy an edge.”
The three academics contended that their analysis “provides practical guidance for marketers seeking to achieve image transfers from an event to their brand”.
More specifically, they argued that to “enhance image transfer, they should increase the typicality of their advertisements by including representative elements of the event, such as an athlete competing or a symbol of the city hosting the event”.
“For some brands,” the scholars continued, “the cost of becoming an official sponsor now can be seen as a direct investment in advertisement typicality, because the status of official sponsors captures the benefits of typicality-inducing advertising elements, which are key to the delivery of the image transfer they seek.”
The advertising typicality paper appears as part of a What We Know About Sports Sponsorships section of the Journal of Advertising Research.
Sourced from Journal of Advertising Research; additional content by WARC staff
