Relationship management in effective sports sponsorship

Key words

sports sponsoring partnership relations sports marketing

Abstract

Sponsoring on the sports market should be treated not as a promotional tool, but rather as the act of building a relationship network, which is created and developed as the partners cooperate. Such a point of view brings about new challenges connected to managing a sports organisation and requirements towards positioning sponsoring in the marketing communication strategy of the sponsor to emerge in the context of expected effectiveness of all activities. The cooperation between a sports organisation and a sponsor requires a processual approach and the implementation of rules favouring the process of building a partnership. The process of managing the relations in the relationship network should be analysed on the strategy level, and consider the business and the expectations of each partner. Because those expectations can differ, and there may be a relative lack of desire to cooperate, which is rather common on the Polish sports market, managing a relationship network is a challenge that is difficult to coordinate.