Sponsorship and Covid-19: Exploring challenges and strategies from business-to-business (B2B) perspective

At present, most stakeholders (e.g., sponsors; sponsee) in sponsorship are experiencing several challenges when getting a sponsorship and financial survivability. From the sponsors’ perspective, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a major impact on the sponsors’ financial which have caused serious difficulties in doing their business. The annual profit for the sponsors will inevitably therefore be affected due to the economic turbulence. For instance, Hertz Global Holdings Inc., one of the nation’s largest car-rental companies, reported to have filed for bankruptcy and has terminated 16,000 employees (Forbes, 2020). Sports sponsorship has contributed to 70% of sponsorship expenditure (IEG, 2018). However, most sports activities around the world have been postponed or cancelled due to Covid-19. For instance, the Tokyo Olympic which was scheduled in July 2020 has been postponed to the following year. In the football context, most of major football leagues were stopped or postponed in 2020, and some of the leagues are still playing without spectators. As a result, almost 38% or $10 billion of sponsorship fee were affected due to the Covid-19 (International Event Group, 2020). Therefore, it will be interesting to understand the importance of sponsorship, and identify the challenges experienced in sponsorship. As such, this presentation will also explore the sponsorship strategies specifically from the sponsor-sponsee perspective.