eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

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Objective of the Study The objective of this study was to investigate co-marketing alliances in the form of event sponsorship. The motivation for this study came from the industry practitioners, and there was also a research gap in existing literature. This study was to shed light into a main research problem that deals with the motivation and performance of co-marketing alliance in management education industry.

Research Method This thesis represents a single case study that employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. A survey questionnaire and an unstructured theme interview were used for data collection. The questionnaire was sent to total of 29 partners of IIR Finland Oy, via an online survey instrument.

Findings The findings of this thesis suggest that there are several different motives for engaging in event marketing: awareness, access to specific customer segment, new customer generation, and influencing the decision makers of the target group. The nature of the co-marketing alliance suggests that there is cooperation not only in marketing, but it can extend to other activities as well; in this case it is the production. Event cooperation has the ability to bring benefits related to awareness and visibility among the target group, thus making it easier to create new contacts, brand related benefits, especially the ability to associate to the topic of the event, as well as give the possibility for customer relationship management. For the evaluation of such a co-marketing alliance, the most important issue is to compare the results against the objectives. There are mainly two kinds of metrics in use at the moment: number of new contacts, and sales. Few issues arose as very fundamental for this kind of event cooperation, and these are goal convergence, commitment, fit between event and target group, and fit between event and partner.