The company is the Swiss market leader in a niche segment of the security industry. Their products are top quality and therefore target an upper market customer group situated mainly in Switzerland.The company is interested in extending their marketing tools with sponsoring activities and wishes to better understand if they should pursue sponsoring. Having had a previous experience in sponsor-ing, which was not perceived as having effective results, the management is looking for recommen-dations on how to possibly proceed to achieve successful outcomes.

The authors started the research by analyzing the current state-of-the art theory of sponsoring by utilizing academic papers, publications and trustworthy sources available on the internet. The main findings of the different sources were compiled in the theory and framework presented in this paper. Applying this framework to the research case, the most important variables of success were identi-fied. Based on these findings, the authors proceed with recommendations regarding possible indus-tries and present concrete execution examples.

The research suggests that sponsoring can be an effective marketing tool to achieve brand recogni-tion, brand image and correlating results in sales for the client and is therefore recommended to pur-sue. While sponsoring sports events take the main portion of global sponsoring investments, the authors concluded that this type of sponsoring does not fit to the client, the reasons being, that the brand is highly specific and regional and therefore negligible recall value of the brand can be expected. In addition, the target customer segment, which consists of wealthy individuals, is not specifically ad-dressed in sports events, where the audience is mixed regarding age and levels of disposable in-come. The research concludes that events with a much better chance to gather the upper market audience would generate a better effectiveness of the sponsoring activities. Therefore, the authors recommend focusing on upper market events in the jewelry, watches, art etc. Such events also offer the opportunity to leverage the sponsoring ac-tivities with additional marketing efforts that address directly possible customers such as product samples, company video, website references, brochures.