Philip Gross addresses a new opportunity for growing brands that may
reside within a sponsorship alliance. Typically, brands vie for image
transfer from an event or other property when entering a sponsorship
engagement. Yet this practice leaves a valuable part of a sponsorship
alliance unexploited. Specifically, the author infers from theories of
social and cognitive psychology to propose and test a research model
that accounts for a sponsor to also gain from brand attitude and
personality traits innately tied to a co-sponsor of the same event. The
results provide evidence for direct image transfer between two sponsor
brands. Hence, pairing with a co-sponsor might fortify or dilute a
sponsor brand's image depending on the expediency of the image conveyed
by that ally.