Guidelines for sponsorship signaling within socially complex markets

Organizations use sponsorships to influence various marketing, financial, and public relations outcomes. Sponsorship communications occur in socially complex markets where messages diffuse quickly. Such messages are also widely accessible to and influenced by various audiences, which can be supportive, neutral, skeptical, or decisively antagonistic. These conditions require managers to adopt nuanced and holistically integrated ways of making their messages acceptable and engaging for a wide variety of audiences, while also being robust to scrutiny. The article addresses this challenge by drawing on signaling theory to present a process model and guidelines for managing sponsorships within socially complex markets. Specifically, it outlines how different message content and sponsorship characteristics combine to influence signal reception, market responses, and feedback. The model is then merged with research on sponsorship authenticity to guide managerial application. Initially, sponsors establish the signal content and primary target audiences through selecting sponsee partners with whom they have authentic fit (Guideline 1). Sponsors can then develop specific characteristics of commitment, observability, and credibility (Guidelines 2–4). Finally, sponsors should conduct prelaunch and postlaunch assessments to adapt to how the sponsorship is received by various audiences and subgroups on an ongoing basis (Guideline 5).