In terms of the event planning process sponsorship canbe an important factor in ensuring that the event is feasible and so consideration of potentialsponsors can begin as early as stage 2, the creation of the concept. For many events the lack ofsponsors is the one factor that leads to the decision to not go ahead and so the earlyidentification of sponsors and indeed early contracted agreement with sponsors can be critical.

There are a number of stages in the development of an event sponsorship programme. Havingidentified the events objectives and possibly set optimum revenue targets it can become clear thatsponsorship is an effective tool for the achievement of those objectives. What follows is asituational analysis. This provides an audit of the event assets that can be used effectively indelivering the communications requirements of sponsors. Having identified these assets they can bebundled together to form packages that can then be sold off-the-shelf to interested sponsors. Thebundling up of corporate hospitality, programme advertising and use of logo flash opportunities hasbeen much utilized in the past. Whilst this has been the common practice in the industry it is nota customer-focused approach in that it is selling what the event wants to sell and not necessarilywhat the sponsor wants to buy, sometimes referred to as marketing myopia (Levitt, 1960). This iswhere it is important to use research to produce more effective sponsorships that can develop overtime. The key for event managers is that they recognize that sponsorship is a mutual relationshipand that...