Internal Brand Management, Sport Sponsoring, and Cross-functional Collaboration: An Exploratory Study

Sponsoring is an important external communication tool, where organisations spend more than 60 billion US dollars annually pre pandemic with a strong growth rate predicted for the years ahead. In particular, sport sponsorship represents the vast majority of this communication expenditure. Leveraging the full potential of (sport) sponsorship, its strategy needs to extend beyond external communications to include internal branding and to appeal to employees as a second audience. Successful internal branding means consistently fulfilling the brand promise, differentiating from competitors, and providing a competitive advantage. However, the value of leveraging sport sponsorship to appeal to both internal and external audiences is rarely documented and research in this area remains scarce. Therefore, because of this gap in this area and the value that research can add to organisations, this research explores how sport sponsorship can contribute to internal branding to propose a more effective way of leveraging sport sponsorship for internal branding. This research study in the context of internal branding links back to resource-based view theory, where human resources are seen as the decisive factor for differentiating and achieving a competitive advantage. An inductive, qualitative research design explores how sport sponsorship can contribute to internal branding. Considering the interrelatedness of internal branding and employer branding, part of this research explores how sport sponsoring can also assist with employer branding. This research differentiates itself from existing sponsoring-related internal branding research by applying a cross-disciplinary research design across 10 countries and four continents, including marketing, human resources, internal branding, employer branding, and sponsoring lenses alike. This strategy proved successful as rich data emerged from the online focus groups. The main contribution of this research represents a novel conceptual model that enables a holistic brand knowledge management approach to optimise leveraging internal branding and employer branding potential from sport sponsorship. This model informs how to disseminate and foster sponsoring and branding knowledge throughout the organisation. This model can also be used when evaluating which sponsoring partnership to select whilst ensuring that the partnership will provide maximum contribution to the brand.