Event marketing and event sponsorship: can too much of a ‘good’ thing harm the brand?

Event marketing and event sponsorship represent some of the fastest growing communication tools organizations use today. Yet, while related in practice, little research has examined them together. In addition, most event marketing and event sponsorship research focuses on linear relationships with consumer outcomes, overlooking non-linear links with brand performance. We address these issues by distinguishing between event marketing and non-proprietary event sponsorship, developing a framework of their quadratic relationships with brand performance, and testing this framework on 207 UK managers. Structural equation modeling results suggest invert-U relationships exist between the two communication tools and brand performance. Findings are discussed.