The effects of pre-scandal associations of athlete endorsers and scandal types on consumer blame and eWOM

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to examine how pre-scandal associations and scandal types interactively influence consumer judgment and negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing from cognitive dissonance theory and associative memory network model, the online experiments (Amazon Mechanical Turk; Nexperiment 1 = 146 and Nexperiment 2 = 189) were conducted to examine the effects of positive pre-scandal associations (performance vs pro-social) and scandal types (performance-related vs -unrelated) on consumer blame and eWOM toward scandalized athletes. Data were analyzed by employing t-test (experiment 1), Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) and PROCESS Model 8 (experiment 2) to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The findings highlight that positive pre-scandal association demonstrated both protecting and backfiring effects depending on the types of scandals. Specifically, when performance-related scandals emerged, consumers made more negative blame judgment of athletes with salient performance association, relative to pro-social association. Inversely, when performance-unrelated scandals occurred, athletes with salient pro-social association were more likely to be blamed. Regarding eWOM, consumers generate more negative eWOM when athletes with pre-performance associations are involved with performance-related scandals. This pattern of the result was not observed when athletes' pro-social association and performance-unrelated scandals were prominent.

Originality/value

The current work adds consumers' negative eWOM toward scandalized athletes to the literature as a predictor of how athletes' pre-scandal association with consumers and scandal types are related. The findings indicate that consumers feel greater dissonance and generate more negative eWOM when athletes' pre-scandal associations and scandal types are closely related.

Citation

Sato, S., Ko, Y.J., Kim, D. and Lee, J.S. (2023), "The effects of pre-scandal associations of athlete endorsers and scandal types on consumer blame and eWOM", International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 814-833. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSMS-07-2022-0139