ABSTRACT
I coined the term ‘sponsorship-linked marketing’ early on in order to distinguish marketing via sports from the marketing of sports (Cornwell, 1995). Sponsoring was coming into the business limelight and terms were being used pell-mell. At the time, I also needed a term that focused not on the sponsorship deal or contract, but on the marketing surrounding it. Thus, defining ‘sponsorship-linked marketing as the orchestration and implementation of marketing activities for the purpose of building and communicating an association (link) to a sponsorship’ (Cornwell, 1995, p. 15) served a descriptive purpose. My research interest has largely been about how one goes about building and communicating associations between the sponsor and the sponsored. At this point, sponsorship-linked marketing could be termed approximate theory, or what Merton (1945) described so long ago as general orientation towards substantive material because it serves to ‘indicate types of variables which are somehow to be taken into account rather than specifying determinate relationships between particular variables’ (p. 464).
