An Analysis of the Olympic Sponsorship Effect on Consumer Brand Choice in the Carbonated Soft Drink Market Using Household Scanner Data

interests are multivariate analyses of sponsorship effects and the use of survey evi-dence in trademark litigation. Minyong Lee is a full time instructor at Valparaiso University. His research interests include financial analyses of sport industry dynamics. Taeyeon Yoon is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. His main research interest is the estimation of econometric models of micro-level data. Charles Rhodes is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include analyses of marketing variables using household-level panel data. Diverse notions on the effectiveness of sport sponsorship have been discussed to some degree in literature on consumer psychology and shareholder wealth. However, there is little investigation on a micro-level that provides empirical evidence for financial returns resulting from sponsorship. In fact, few studies have explored issues related to the evaluation of sponsorship return on investment (ROI), particularly regarding the scope of measurement. This study investigates the effects of a major Olympic spon-sorship on consumers ’ actual soft drink choices. It analyzes Nielsen Homescan pur-chase data for over 10,000 American households for a 3-year period spanning Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the 2006 Olympic Winter Games and the 2008 Summer Games. Our analysis indicates that Olympic sponsorship may have generated signifi-cantly greater consumer choices for Coke over Pepsi during the Games. The effective-ness of sponsorship is statistically supported, even after controlling for sales increases attributed to traditional media advertising. It demonstrates that evaluation of spon-sorship ROI is empirically achievable