Sponsorship serves as an important tool in marketing communication. Little is known concerning the influence of consumers' purchasing intention (PI) in the sport sponsorship setting. People have a relatively distinct social self for each role they play (Stryker 1980; Laverie & Arnett, 2000). An identity is influenced positively by positive feelings related to the identity (Hoelter, 1983). The positive evaluations will be interpreted as appropriate identity performance and will generate positive affect (Stryker, 1968). Accordingly, when identification with a favored team increases among those who recognize a company is providing financial support to an event or league related with that team, so will their willingness be to have positive image of that sponsors and to purchase that sponsors' products. This psychological basis of fan behavior should be considered when sport marketers are planning a marketing strategy. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of team identification with a sports team on the intentions to purchase corporate sponsors' products.
"Social identity theory" (Henri & Tunner, 1979; Srirgy, 1982; Ingham, 1987) was the framework utilized. This study determined whether the domestic-team identification has an effect on the image of sponsors and purchasing intention of the sponsors' products in the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup. The one-way MANOVA examined whether a significant difference existed among the level of domestic-team identification with respect to sponsor image (SI) and purchasing intention (PI) of their products.
Multivariate null hypothesis of equality of the means over all levels of team identification for two variables, SI and PI, were rejected at the 0.05 level (Wilk's lamda= .82 F [4, 1048]=28.29, p<001). All of the ANOVA null hypotheses for identifying the dependent variables that contributed to the rejection of the multivariate null were rejected at the .05 level with p value less than .001. Computed values of F (2, 526) were 46.3 and 41.5 for SI and PI respectively. The values of strength of association for the same variables were .14 and .15. Tukey HSD results indicated the mean value of SI was significantly higher according to the level of team identification while the mean value of PI was not significantly different between lowly identified group and moderately identified group. This study suggests favorable purchasing intentions with positive image are more likely to occur as team identification increases. Specifically, this gives the World Cup great potential to be a very useful marketing tool for corporate sponsors.