Introduction

Decisions on sponsorship are, more often than not, taken on the basis of hunch and other judgmental criteria. This appendix proposes a matrix for the systematic assessment of sponsorship options using three variables (the image potential, the proto-image of the firm, and the corporate social responsibility). Its merits are multiple:

1. (1) the comparison of different options at the same time;

2. (2) the provision of a homogeneous and across-the-board criterion; and

3. (3) the visualization of the comparative options in a bidimensional plane, while taking advantage of three indicators.

Nowadays, good corporate citizenship has become an indispensable condition for a company to obtain a socially acceptable image. This concept has made it increasingly normal for companies to take pride in being pillars of the community where they are based. Sponsorship and patronage of cultural and sporting events are, therefore, frequently granted by companies with a view to projecting their image to the society and, at the same time, helping the communities to develop.

However, top management or key decision-makers for this type of business activity are sometimes forced to base their decisions on intuition, in the absence of adequate conceptual tools, while others limit themselves to more or less objective indicators (e.g. media impact in terms of frequency of mentions or the number of spectators who have seen a particular event), despite the fact that the cause and effect relationship between the indicators and the sought after result have not been established (at least academically).