REVIEW PAPER Sponsorship-linked marketing: research surpluses and shortages T. Bettina Cornwell 1 & Youngbum Kwon 2 Received: 16 August 2018 /Accepted: 12 April 2019 # Academy of Marketing Science 2019 Abstract This systematic review of sponsorship-linked marketing from 1996 to 2017 analyzes the current state of research. The overarch- ing conclusion is that there is a surplus of research that examines audience responses to sponsorship-linked marketing but a shortage of research that examines marketing management of the sponsorship process. This misalignment of research needs to research investments stems partly from a failure to consider the sponsorship process as a whole. Research has failed to account for the complexity of the sponsorship-linked marketing ecosystem that influences both audience response and management decision making. The authors develop a sponsoring process model, generalizable to all sponsorship contexts, as an organizing frame for the review and as a reorienting perspective for research and practice. To spur future work, they advance a series of research questions and, to support practice, provide managerial insights. Keywords Sponsorship . Ecosystems . Engagement . Marketing management . Advertising Television advertising’ s move from being discussed as Btraditional media^ to being called Blegacy media^ marks the long-predicted death of advertising as mass media (Rust and Oliver 1994). In place of mass-media advertising is a dazzling array of Bindirect ^ marketing approaches (Cornwell 2008), including sponsorship, product placement, and influencer marketing. Sponsorship of sports, the arts, charity, and entertainment has emerged as a mean- ingful component of brand strategy (Cliffe and Motion 2005). Academic articles have followed this evolution in marketing prac- tice, though research still has little in the way of comprehensive frameworks. The failure to advance comprehensive conceptuali- zations of sponsorship can partly be attributed to its long treatment as advertising, which deserves rethinking. Worldwide advertising spending was predicted to reach $628 billion in 2018 (eMarketer 2018), and outside this figure, worldwide sponsorship spending is likely to have exceeded $65 billion (IEG 2018). Importantly, for every $1 invested in sponsorship rights, $2.20 is spent on sponsorship-related advertising and promotion (IEG 2016). Sponsoring is a multifaceted strategic decision that is accompa- nied by advertising spending, and research has not invested ade- quately in understanding the sponsoring process. This work has two overarching goals. The first is to introduce the topic and map current research through the organizing frame of the sponsorship process and, in doing so, reorient future re- search. The clear surplus of research on audience response to sponsorship-linked marketing and the shortage of research on marketing management of the sponsorship process suggest the need for a comprehensive model that allows generalizations about what is known. Included in this is the importance of ecosystems, boundaries, and complex interrelationships. The second goal is to offer theoretically grounded questions to spur interest in under- researched topics and to support practitioners with management insights. Sponsorship-linked marketing and prior reviews Sponsorship is Ba cash or in-kind fee paid to a property (typ- ically in sports, arts, entertainment, or causes) in return for Mark Houston and John Hulland served as Special Issue Editors for this article. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00654-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * T. Bettina Cornwell tbc@uoregon.edu Youngbum Kwon ybkwon@umich.edu 1 Department of Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1208, USA 2 Sport Management, School of Kinesiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2013, USA Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00654-w