Event’s sponsoring as a Communication tool to tribes : International Brands versus Consumer Point of View

Laurent ARNONE, Angy GEERTS and Chantal SCOUBEAU
Warocqué Research Center – Warocqué School of Economics and Business Administration
University of Mons-Hainaut
Belgium
Contacts : laurent.arnone@umh.ac.be angy.geerts@umh.ac.be chantal.scoubeau@umh.ac.be

Introduction Sport, leisure activities and hobbies are getting more and more important in people’s everyday lives. If these “ordinary passions”, as they are described by the anthropologist Christian Bromberger (1998), can be performed individually, they often need a collective framework such as a group of friends, a club or an association. People gather in the latter in order to share their passion with other devotees and practice the activity together. These shared passions are often at the centre of what Cova and Cova (2002 : 602) have called neo-tribes, that is to say “a network of heterogeneous persons – in terms of age, sex, income, etc. – who are linked by a shared passion or emotion”. During the 90s our society was characterised by extreme individualism, but nowadays, looking at people attitude and behaviour, we can point to a reverse trend: people are increasingly gathering in small groupings or communities centred around common interests, values or lifestyles.
Tribal events are more and more used by companies in their communication strategies. Whether acting as organizers or as simple sponsors, their involvement in these tribal events gives the companies the opportunity to build a link with the tribe and its members.
However, while these sponsoring strategies are being implemented, most academic research related to tribes have been directed from a consumer behaviour perspective. Except for a few contributions (eg. Cova and Cova, 2001), the managerial aspects related to consumer tribes have often been neglected in the academic literature. The aim of this research is thus namely to