FOR THE DEGREE OF PHD IN BUSINESS

PhD Student: Shardul Wartikar

Title: A Study of Sponsorship Decision Making to Inform Managerial Practice

Date & Time: Monday, April 27th, 2026, 9:30am – 11:30am

Location: Lindsay 30 or via remote connection

Remote Connection: https://bentley.zoom.us/j/96465389915

Dissertation Committee Chair: Mingfei Li, Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University.

Committee Members: Lan Xia, Professor and Chair of Marketing, Bentley University; Pravin Nath, Associate Professor of Marketing, Clemson University.

ABSTRACT

Sponsorship is “a cash or in-kind fee paid to a property (typically in sports, entertainment, arts, or causes) in return for access to the exploitable commercial potential of that property” (IEG 2017). Organizations today are investing more money in sponsorships, and more organizations are incorporating sponsorships in their marketing plans. But making sponsorship investment decisions is complex. And no theory driven decision-making framework exists to assist companies with selecting events to sponsor. The need to address this gap was our main motivation to do this study. Our dissertation seeks to improve sponsorship investment decision-making. We do that by creating a validated quantified decision-making framework for sponsorship investments that can inform managerial practice. We are structuring the stages as a three-paper format.

In the first paper, we map out the current sponsorship decision-making process. We do that by first conducting a literature review of research on sponsorship decision-making. As we find limited pre-existing research on the process of sponsorship decision-making, we conduct qualitative semi-structured interviews with seven organizations to explore the question “How do these sponsors take decisions on sponsorship investments?” Our findings suggest that there is no standard process for sponsorship decision-making in organizations and sponsors navigate through uncertainty using qualitative judgements and sense making. We identify that the three critical decision-making factors from their perspective are sponsor-event fit, audience-event fit and activation opportunities, but they do not have a quantitative way to evaluate them. Therefore, there is value in building a validated quantified sponsorship decision-making framework.

In the second paper, we take the next step by building a new measurement model which captures the three critical decision-making factors, sponsor-event fit, audience-event fit and activation opportunities. We conduct a literature review to understand how these three common factor constructs are currently measured. We find that the measurement of these common factors needs to be updated to reflect the behaviors and opportunities of today’s sponsorship and audience environments. We update the items using expert reviews, conduct a consumer survey using those items to collect data for sponsorships by 8 brands across 2 events, and then use a sequence of quantitative methods to determine validity of the common factors and finalize the measurement model. With a validated measurement model, the next step is to create a framework that can be used for taking decisions.

In the final paper, we plan to extend the measurement model into a decision-making framework and fill the gap identified in paper 1. We will do that by including other elements that influence outcomes – main elements being the amount of spend on activation, as well as moderator elements like length of sponsorship and pre-existing perceptions about the sponsor. We will build a structural equation model that will test the structural paths between the common factors in the measurement model, the new elements and sponsorship outcomes. We also plan to use statistical simulations to test the potential impact of uncertainty in decision elements on outcomes.

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