The effectiveness of event-sponsorship in enhancing brand equity on the people in Kota Kinabalu / Mohd Zameer Aizat Bashir

In recent years, marketers have started to realize that the key to a successful marketing is by creating differential advantage through providing emotional (experiential) benefits for the market. This is because the market nowadays are more active, involvement craving in deciding whether or not to consume a product or brand. To provide that, marketers have turned to the now-conventional approach to communicate their brand to the market; which is through event-sponsorship. It is an approach where marketers can engage the market, promote interactivity with the market, earning their trust and eventually be able to earn and create good, positive brand image. This will then theoretically help to persuade and initiate the desire within the audiences toward the brand or product, in other words, enhancing the brand equity. The key to this is first to adapt to the market, their ever-evolving wants for exciting, engaging experiences, staying afloat with and suiting their way by getting them involved. Hence, in this research, the effectiveness of event-sponsorship will be tested on people in Kota Kinabalu, to see how beneficial such approach is for marketers in approaching the people in the capital city of the State. The number of respondents for this research was regulated so that the result will favor neither over nor under estimation, hence a fair assessment of the issue can be extracted. The test result will then be analyzed to see the effectiveness of event-sponsorships in enhancing brand equity on the people in Kota Kinabalu; and further recommendations will be obtained for future eventsponsorships to be more effective.