Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC)

1. Abstract

The Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC) scale is a concise psychometric instrument developed to evaluate consumer perceptions of novelty, originality, and imaginative execution within corporate sponsorship communications. Originating from research on cognitive processing and advertising efficacy conducted by Robert Madrigal and Jessica King (2017), the instrument evaluates how audience members perceive creative sponsorship executions—particularly those designed to bridge incongruent or non-obvious brand-event pairings through figurative framing mechanisms such as analogy and metaphor. Composed of three semantic differential items evaluated across a 7-point continuum (anchored by pairs such as Uncreative / Creative, Unimaginative / Imaginative, and Novel / Familiar), the scale yields a unidimensional composite score representing the perceived creativity of the promotional message. Empirical evaluations indicate robust psychometric properties, exhibiting high internal consistency reliability (frequently exceeding Cronbach’s alpha values of .85 across diverse experimental samples), solid convergent validity with related consumer engagement metrics, and sound discriminant validity against conventional promotional constructs like perceived brand familiarity and general attitude toward the advertisement. By quantifying subjective cognitive responses to promotional design, the scale provides marketing researchers, corporate communication strategists, and sports marketing scholars with an empirically validated measurement standard to analyze how creative advertising rhetoric facilitates cognitive resolution, schema restructuring, brand recall, and sponsorship goodwill.

2. Keywords

Sponsorship Promotion Creativity, SPC scale, advertising creativity, creative analogy, sponsorship incongruence, psychometrics, consumer perception, semantic differential, brand alliance, schema congruence, message framing, marketing psychology

3. Authors

The Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC) measurement paradigm was introduced and validated by:

• Robert Madrigal, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Charles H. Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States. Dr. Madrigal’s research interests encompass consumer psychology, sports marketing, sponsorship efficacy, advertising strategy, and cognitive message processing.
• Jessica King, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Western New Mexico University / University of Oregon alumni. Dr. King specializes in brand management, marketing communications, figurative rhetoric in advertising, and creative problem-solving in consumer contexts.

Correspondence regarding the original research can be directed to the faculty at the Department of Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC) scale is to systematically assess the degree to which consumers perceive a promotional sponsorship advertisement or marketing activation as original, inventive, and imaginative. In contemporary corporate communication, organizations allocate substantial financial resources to commercial sponsorships, ranging from elite sporting events and entertainment properties to non-profit causes and civic initiatives. A persistent managerial challenge in sponsorship research involves the management of perceived congruence—the natural thematic, functional, or symbolic fit between the sponsor brand and the sponsored entity. When a sponsorship pairing is characterized by moderate-to-high incongruence (for instance, a technology software corporation sponsoring an environmental conservation initiative or an industrial manufacturer backing an extreme sports event), consumers frequently struggle to establish meaningful associative links, leading to cognitive dissonance, superficial processing, or diminished brand recall.

Madrigal and King (2017) demonstrated that utilizing figurative cognitive mechanisms—specifically creative analogy and conceptual metaphor—enables advertisers to articulate meaningful relationships across seemingly incongruent domains. Under this paradigm, perceived creativity serves as a cognitive catalyst. When a promotion is executed creatively, it captures viewer attention, activates elaborative cognitive processing, and prompts individuals to construct novel mental bridges that reconcile the incongruent pairing. Consequently, measuring the perceived creativity of the promotional delivery itself (rather than merely evaluating the underlying brand or event) is vital for uncovering the psychological mechanics governing sponsorship effectiveness.

From a research standpoint, the SPC scale serves as an indispensable tool for experimental manipulation checks and structural equation modeling (SEM). Researchers employ the instrument to determine whether creative execution manipulations successfully induce perceived novelty without inducing communicative confusion. In applied industry contexts, marketing managers, creative copywriters, and sponsorship agencies utilize the scale during copy testing, pre-testing focus groups, and campaign post-evaluations. By isolating perceived creativity as an independent evaluative variable, corporate sponsors can refine their creative copy, optimize return on marketing investment (ROMI), and ensure that promotional narratives effectively stimulate positive cognitive and affective brand trajectories.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of Sponsorship Promotion Creativity represents a multidimensional psychological phenomenon evaluated through a unified perceptual response. In the psychological and marketing literature, creativity is traditionally operationalized through two core pillars: novelty (originality, divergence, uniqueness, or unexpectedness) and meaningfulness (relevance, appropriateness, utility, or logic). In the specific context of promotional advertisements, the SPC focuses predominantly on the subjective perception of divergent cognitive execution—the degree to which an execution demonstrates imaginative departure from standard, mundane promotional templates.

Perceived promotional creativity operates along several key perceptual axes:

• Originality and Novelty: The perception that an advertisement offers fresh ideas, unique conceptual angles, or an unconventional juxtaposition of ideas. In the SPC scale, this is tapped through evaluation of novel framing versus overly familiar or derivative communicative formats. When respondents perceive high novelty, their baseline attentional filters are bypassed, prompting increased mental elaboration.
• Imaginative Articulation: The degree to which the creative production reflects conceptual playfulness, ingenuity, and inventiveness. Imaginative promotions synthesize disparate ideas—such as connecting an enterprise cloud computing service to an endurance athlete’s physiological training regime—via clever structural mappings. The consumer perceives an intellectual craft behind the message rather than a mechanical placement of brand logos.
• Artistic and Rhetorical Divergence: The extent to which the creative message avoids predictable tropes and genre clichés. Rather than relying on simple brand placement or literal endorsements, divergent creative promotions construct a rich visual or verbal narrative that invites active interpretation.

Crucially, within the context of Madrigal and King’s framework, sponsorship creativity is distinct from overall advertisement likeability or brand attitude. An individual may recognize a promotion as highly creative and imaginative even if their initial predisposition toward the sponsoring corporation is neutral. Consequently, the SPC construct captures an essential cognitive attribution regarding the message source’s creative competence and expressive delivery.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Sponsorship Promotion Creativity scale is anchored within robust foundational frameworks of consumer psychology, cognitive linguistics, and persuasion theory. Chief among these are Structure-Mapping Theory, Schema Incongruity Theory, and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM).

Structure-Mapping Theory

Formulated by Dedre Gentner (1983), Structure-Mapping Theory explains how human beings comprehend analogical reasoning. Analogies function by mapping a relational system from a familiar base domain onto an unfamiliar or dissimilar target domain. In sponsorship advertising, an advertiser uses analogy to guide the consumer’s interpretation: the qualities of an elite sporting event (target) are mapped onto the attributes of an incongruent corporate brand (base). Madrigal and King (2017) theorized that perceived creativity in the promotion corresponds directly to the sophistication of this relational alignment. A highly creative promotion successfully isolates deep, structural relational predicates rather than superficial surface similarities, allowing consumers to experience an intellectual ‘aha!’ moment that resolves conceptual incongruence.

Schema Incongruity Theory

Originating from Mandler’s (1982) seminal work on cognitive schema adaptation, Schema Incongruity Theory posits that stimuli congruent with existing cognitive expectations produce mild, predictable positive affect but low cognitive engagement. In contrast, moderately incongruent stimuli disrupt automatic schema processing, triggering cognitive arousal and exploratory cognitive elaboration aimed at resolving the discrepancy. The SPC instrument captures the exact cognitive mechanism that facilitates successful schema accommodation: perceived creativity provides the contextual framework through which consumers bridge the conceptual gap between sponsor and property, yielding heightened cognitive satisfaction upon successful resolution.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), persuasion can occur through central or peripheral cognitive routes. When promotional creativity is high, it operates not merely as an affective peripheral cue, but as an incentive for central route processing. Consumers are motivated to carefully decode the creative execution, analyzing the underlying message arguments embedded within the visual metaphors and clever analogies. This active mental processing generates more durable, resilient cognitive schema modifications and stronger corporate brand associations.

7. Validity

The construct validity of the Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC) scale has been substantiated through rigorous experimental designs, confirmatory factor analyses, and correlational assessments across multiple empirical investigations.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity of the SPC instrument is confirmed by its substantial correlations with established measures of advertising novelty, artistic execution, and cognitive engagement. In empirical testing (Madrigal & King, 2017), the three items loaded strongly and uniformly onto a single common factor, with standardized factor loadings consistently exceeding .80. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values typically surpass the recommended .50 threshold (often exceeding .70), demonstrating that the variance captured by the construct is substantially greater than variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To ensure that the SPC scale evaluates perceived creative execution rather than generic positive consumer sentiment, discriminant validity was tested against related marketing constructs, including:

• Attitude toward the Ad ($A_{ad}$): Although correlated, perceived creativity demonstrates distinct variance, showing that consumers clearly differentiate between finding an advertisement imaginative and merely liking the commercial.
• Perceived Fit / Congruence: Baseline congruence between sponsor and property operates independently of promotional creativity; experimental manipulations demonstrate that low-fit pairings can achieve high creativity scores when accompanied by effective metaphorical framing.
• Brand Familiarity: The perceived creativity of the advertisement remains distinct from prior familiarity with the sponsoring brand or the sponsored event.

The square root of the AVE for the SPC scale regularly exceeds the inter-construct correlations, meeting the rigorous Fornell-Larcker criterion for discriminant distinctiveness.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is demonstrated through the scale’s predictable causal relationships within structural models of persuasion. Research shows that higher scores on the SPC scale directly predict:

• Enhanced comprehension of the intended sponsorship message.
• Greater positive attitude change toward incongruent sponsor brands.
• Significantly higher levels of cognitive elaboration and recall accuracy for sponsor branding elements.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency reliability of the Sponsorship Promotion Creativity scale has been demonstrated across diverse experimental conditions, consumer demographics, and product categories.

Across the experimental studies documented by Madrigal and King (2017), the scale demonstrated exemplary internal consistency:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): Baseline reliability coefficients across studies consistently ranged between $lpha = .86$ and $lpha = .93$, substantially exceeding the conventional psychometric threshold of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations indicate composite reliability values consistently above .88, confirming that the three semantic indicators reliably converge upon the latent creativity construct.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the three semantic pairs (creative, imaginative, novel) routinely exceed .70, demonstrating that each item contributes strongly to the central psychological dimension.

Because the instrument uses a semantic differential format anchored by established bipolar adjectives, random response error is reduced, ensuring stability and reproducibility across diverse sample groups, including general consumer panels, undergraduate subject pools, and professional sporting event attendees.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the Sponsorship Promotion Creativity scale has been rigorously explored and validated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and maximum likelihood factor extractions with varimax and oblimin rotations consistently yield a single-factor solution. Across iterations, the scree plot exhibits a sharp inflection after the first factor, with only one eigenvalue substantially exceeding the Kaiser-Guttman criterion of 1.0 (typical initial eigenvalues range from 2.20 to 2.65). The single extracted factor accounts for over 75% to 85% of the total variance observed across the three items, confirming strict unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated via confirmatory factor modeling using standard estimation techniques (such as maximum likelihood estimation in AMOS or Mplus), the single-factor model yields excellent goodness-of-fit metrics. Typical fit parameters reported across validation samples include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .98$ (frequently attaining 1.00 in saturated three-indicator specifications).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .97$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .05$ (with 90% confidence intervals indicating excellent fit).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .03$.

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for the three indicators are exceptionally high and statistically significant ($p < .001$):

• Uncreative / Creative: $lambda pprox .88 – .94$
• Unimaginative / Imaginative: $lambda pprox .86 – .92$
• Novel / Familiar (recoded): $lambda pprox .78 – .85$

These robust factor loadings verify that each semantic pair functions as an effective indicator of the latent perceptual construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete structural specification of the measurement instrument is outlined below:

• Instrument Name: Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC)
• Author(s): Robert Madrigal and Jessica King
• Publication Year: 2017
• Construct Measured: Perceived novelty, originality, and imaginative execution of a sponsorship marketing promotion or advertisement.
• Test Format: Self-report questionnaire utilizing bipolar semantic differential scales.
• Item Count: 3 items (bipolar adjective pairs).
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 to 7).
• Scoring Rules:
  • Item 1 (Uncreative / Creative) is scored directly from 1 to 7.
  • Item 2 (Unimaginative / Imaginative) is scored directly from 1 to 7.
  • Item 3 (Novel / Familiar) is reverse-coded as Familiar / Novel (1 = Familiar to 7 = Novel) to align the directionality of scoring.
  • Items are averaged to create a single composite score reflecting perceived sponsorship promotion creativity, with higher scores indicating greater perceived creativity.
• Target Population: Consumers, experimental research subjects, and commercial target audiences exposed to corporate sponsorship activations, print advertisements, video commercials, or digital marketing campaigns.
• Administration Time: Less than 1 minute.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Sponsorship Promotion Creativity (SPC) scale was published in 2017 in the Journal of Advertising. As an academic psychometric tool, the items are available for scholarly, educational, and empirical non-commercial research purposes without licensing fees, provided that appropriate academic attribution is cited in accordance with APA guidelines. Commercial organizations, consulting agencies, and market research providers intending to integrate the instrument into proprietary copy-testing platforms or commercial testing suites should review copyright policies established by the publisher (Taylor & Francis) and consult the primary authors regarding formal commercial permissions.

12. References

The theoretical and empirical literature supporting the development and application of the SPC scale includes:

• Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3
• Madrigal, R., & King, J. (2017). Creative analogy as a means of articulating incongruent sponsorships. Journal of Advertising, 46(4), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2017.1364284
• Mandler, G. (1982). The structure of value: Accounting for taste. In M. S. Clark & S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Affect and cognition: The seventeenth annual Carnegie symposium on cognition (pp. 3–36). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Smith, R. E., MacKenzie, S. B., Yang, X., Buchholz, L. M., & Darley, W. K. (2007). Modeling the determinants and effects of creativity in advertising. Marketing Science, 26(6), 819–833. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1070.0272

13. Items of the Scale