Finanskrisen och Sveriges Idrottssponsorer - Sport & Affärer

Summary
A financial crisis paralyzed the world in year 2008 but it’s not until now we can see what
consequences it had on the society. Sport plays today a large and important role in the
Swedish society and has been commercialized and professionalized the last decades.
Sponsoring of sport activities has growth largely since the mid 80’s and has become a popular
marketing communication. The Swedish 50 biggest sport sponsors invest approximately 1,8
billion SEK in sponsoring of sports.
The aim with this paper is to conduct a study on Sweden’s largest sponsors of sports to build
an understanding if the financial crisis has affected them in their strategies concerning
sponsoring as a tool in marketing communication. To identify who these sponsors are, we
have used Sponsorworld’s Top 50 list, which annually publishes the largest sponsors of sports
in Sweden.
Our survey shows that sponsoring as a tool in marketing communication is well planned
strategically. The most common overall, or main, goal the sponsors have with their
sponsoring is to increase the brand awareness. Most companies uses different goals for every
sponsor objective which strategically leads to the main goal. None of the investigated
companies have strategically changed their overall goal as an effect of the financial crisis.
However this paper shows that a strategic change has occurred concerned these goals for
every individual sponsor object.
The majority of the companies have changed their strategy in sponsoring as a result of the
crisis. Several companies, mainly those who operates in industries that the crisis did hit hard
against, have been reducing their investment in sponsoring of sports and also cancelling
current sponsor contracts. A few companies have changed their strategy in the opposite way
and increased their investment during the time of the financial crisis. They saw a competitive
advantage to their competitors changing their strategy in this way. Those companies that
didn’t changed their strategies claims to have long term strategic planning which does not
changes during hard financial times.
In order to find these answers we conducted telephone interviews sponsorship managers at the
companies. We were able to collect information from 28 of the 50 companies and those were
offered to be anonymous in this research and paper.