Relatedness, prominence, and constructive sponsor identification

Proper identification of event sponsors is a key concern in sponsorship com munication. Although practitioners have assumed that event sponsors are ide ntified primarily through pure recollection, the authors show that sponsor identification involves a substantial degree of construction. Results from three experiments indicate that sponsor identification is biased toward bra nds that are prominent in the marketplace and semantically related to the e vent. These biases appear to emanate from constructive processes whereby du ring identification, respondents use the prominence and relatedness of avai lable brands as heuristics to verify their recollection of event-sponsor as sociations. The effects of relatedness on sponsor identification seem stron ger and more robust than those of prominence, which appears to be invoked o nly for large events. Both effects are robust across methods of identificat ion assessment though less pronounced when the accuracy threshold is high.