Past studies examining sponsorship have primarily focused on the sponsor and not the sporting event. The current study seeks to analyze how sponsorship associations are interpreted by consumers toward the event through the Elaboration Likelihood Advertising Model (ELAM). The purpose of this study is to: (1) examine consumers’s perceptions of authenticity and unauthenticity stemming from sport sponsor-event partnerships and the effects of each partnership on consumers’s elaboration, attitude, and emotion; and (2) assess the impact of consumer attitudes and emotions toward the sporting event on event-related behavioral intentions based on perceived authentic and unauthentic partnerships. Significant differences were found among healthy, unhealthy and CSR experiments for authenticity, elaboration, and attitude but not for emotion. In addition, emotion was positive and significantly related to event-related behavioral intentions for all three experiments, while attitude was positive and significantly related to event-related behavioral intentions for the healthy experiment only. Findings provide evidence that sponsorship associations affect consumer evaluations toward the event.
