The value of sports sponsorships in sailing

Sailing is a sport with peculiar traits: it is an activity that goes beyond sport and involves an enormous set of values, lifestyles, attitudes. Sailing carries messages that are difficult to find in other sports: respect and care for the environment, symbiosis with nature, commitment of the individual to the team. These traits allow sailing be an attractive and fertile soil for sponsors: in the years, many companies have entered the sailing world with sponsorships, beginning with the famous experience of Sir Lipton in the worldwide famous America's Cup dated back to 1899. The purpose of this work is to analyze the role and importance of sponsorships in contemporary society, trying to find out a system to measure the outcomes and the returns that sponsorships activations can produce for a sponsor firm. In particular, we are going to analyze the experience of Sailing Series® 2016 circuit of regattas, trying to determine the returns that a company may have obtained by activating a title sponsorship of the events.