Introduction While the importance of branding as a marketing tool is undisputed, there has been some debate over the meaning of brand equity and the particular ways in which marketers can expect to generate goodwill for the brand over time (Bello and Holbrook, 1995; Feldwick, 1996). Rossiter and Percy (1997) emphasise that the best promotions in which marketers can engage are those that reinforce a positive attitude toward the brand. They describe these activities as consumer franchise building promotions. One method they suggest to achieve this is to focus on communication values considered intrinsic to the brand. Values of this type may be linked with product benefits such as risk reduction, status or group identification. Researchers investigating these aspects of consumer behavior have taken a range of different paths, linking the concept of the brand with, for instance, that of familiarity and involvement (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987; Laurent and Kapferer, 1985) or that of moods and social group membership (de Chernatony and McWilliam, 1990). Studies of brand effects have focussed on the concept of brand associations, which encompasses the meaning(s) evoked by the brand name to consumers. While it is difficult to say whether corporate strategy reflects the academic research conducted on brand associations (Aaker, 1996; Keller, 1993), it is a fact that companies continue to invest heavily in the process of “building” or “maintaining” brands, by adapting the strategy and the methods used to implement this strategy, to the real or perceived changes in the environments in which they compete. More recently, a new means of building brand equity, sponsorship, has received the attention of academic researchers, as well as of corporations directing increasingly large sums of money toward this medium. According to research conducted in 1992 in Australia, sponsors pursue one of two broad categories of objectives: corporate or brand/product related (Ackerman, 1993). In the case of sport sponsorship, firms generally attempt to associate the brand with highly publicised sports individuals and/or events. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of such sponsorships on consumer association with sponsors’ brands and to explore, within this context, the potential of events as communication vehicles. Sponsorship emerged as an important brand building tool as tobacco and liquor companies became excluded from conventional broadcast media and were forced into exploring alternative ways to instil positive associations for their brands in the minds of their target market. The staggering growth of JOURNAL OF PRODUCT & BRAND MANAGEMENT, VOL. 7 NO. 6 1998, pp. 539-556 © MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1061-0421 539 Brand association and memory decay effects of sponsorship: the case of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix Pascale Quester Senior Lecturer, School of Commerce, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia Francis Farrelly Lecturer, Department of Marketing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Brand equity Sponsorship