LAUSR

Sport managers are often faced with a situation where they must activate an incongruent sponsorship in which the fit between a sponsor and property is not self-evident. Existing research has shown that consumers’ perceptions of fit enhance a sponsorship’s effectiveness. Therefore, the challenge is to explain how an otherwise incongruent sponsor and property are related to one another. The current research addresses this problem and considers analogy as a means for articulating an incongruent sponsorship. We find that analogical articulation offers distinct advantages over a more common method of articulating a sponsorship by describing how a property and sponsor’s consumer base overlap.