Effectiveness of Sponsorships in Niche Communities Online: A Preliminary Study

This paper intends to gather some evidences on how sponsorship effectiveness is positively or negatively affected by the choice of focusing on niche communities (the Long Tail Communities), i.e. whether in niche communities there are differences in the members´ brand perception between online and offline sponsors. The preliminary results demonstrate how the explanatory power of the involved variables differs in the case of online and offline sponsors supporting long tail communities.