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Sport events organizers have recently undertaken to disclose to the general public instances where firms have conspired to ambush the official sponsors. In doing so, they have sought to sensitise audiences to sponsors' valuable contribution. However, what is the effect of such disclosure on ambush marketers' brands? This study aims to answer this question, using an experimental approach.

Two successive experiments were conducted. The first study used a student sample (n=120) and a fictitious brand. The second study used a before‐and‐after experiment with control groups (n=480), using four real brands and print disclosure articles. Data was collected from six French metropolitan areas and analysed using Repeated Measure ANOVA and MANOVA.

Ambush marketing disclosure is associated with lower attitudes towards the ambusher's brand. Two variables moderate this effect: involvement in the event and attitude towards sponsorship, both of which worsen the negative influence of ambush disclosure on audiences' attitudes.

While the empirical work reflects one national context and one specific sport event, these findings are the first to empirically support the notion that disclosure of ambush practices adversely impacts ambushers' brand.

These results offer official sponsors and event organisers an effective alternative strategy to legal protection, with demonstrated effects on the core target audience of the event.

The literature has alluded to possible perverse effects of ambush marketing. This study is the first to draw an analogy with corrective advertising to test and demonstrate the impact of ambush disclosure on ambushers' brands.

The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer attitudes towards ambush marketing and official event sponsorship through the lens of sentiment analysis, and to examine social media users' ethical responses to digital event marketing campaigns during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The study employed a sentiment analysis, examining Twitter users’ utilization of sponsor and non-sponsor promotional hashtags. Statistical modelling programme R was used to access Twitter’s API, enabling the analysis and coding of user tweets pertaining to six marketing campaigns. The valence of each tweet – as well as the apparent user motivation underlying each post – was assessed, providing insight into Twitter users’ ethical impressions of sponsor and ambush marketer activities on social media and online engagement with social media marketing.

The study’s findings indicate that consumer attitudes towards ambush marketing may be significantly more positive than previously thought. Users’ attitudes towards ambush marketing appear significantly more positive than previously assumed, as users of social media emerged as highly responsive to creative and value-added non-sponsor campaigns.

The findings affirm that sentiment analysis may afford scholars and practitioners a viable means of assessing consumer attitudes towards social marketing activations, dependent upon campaign objectives and strategy. The study provides a new and invaluable context to consumer affect and ambush ethics research, advancing sponsorship and ambush marketing delivery and social sponsorship analytical practice.

The practice whereby a non-official sponsor brand attempts to “ambush” an official sponsor’s rights continues to threaten sporting events. A key motivator of the ensuing regulatory response is grounded in the ambiguity that ambush marketing generates, namely, by obscuring public awareness of the legitimate sponsor. However, the cognitive processes underpinning sponsorship identification have only recently been investigated empirically. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of ambush advertising on sponsorship memory.

A 2 (brand advertising: sponsorship-linked vs non-sponsorship-linked) × 2 (ambush advertisement: ambush advertisement vs filler) experimental design was used to test the impact of exposure on sponsor recall and recognition.

The results indicate that exposure to ambush advertising has adverse effects cognitively. When presented with a sponsorship-linked advertisement and an ambush advertisement, the participants had diminished recall of who the legitimate sponsor was, and were less likely to recognize them.

This work has important theoretical implications in that it draws together the existing literature on sponsorship, advertising and cognitive fields. Moreover, on a practical level, this work informs the debate on increased regulatory intervention into ambushing practices, which is centered on tensions between balancing fair marketing practice with the rights of sponsors and event organizers.

To date, there is a paucity of research that examines the effects of ambushing in a sports sponsorship context. The unique contribution of this study is that it shows the process through which ambushing advertising adversely impacts sponsors’ rights.

The purpose of this paper is to explore attitudes towards ambush marketing at the 2016 Union of European Football Associations European Championships, seeking to examine fan affect towards ambush marketing.

A 24-item survey questionnaire was constructed, exploring consumers’ general cognition and affection of ambush marketing; following Dickson et al.’s (2015) design, industry-specific attitudes were canvassed, assessing supporters’ views of beer and gambling industry ambush marketers.

Results indicate that fans appear to be marginally more forgiving of ambush practices from beer or gambling brands than across ambushing more generally, yet a prevailing antipathy towards ambush marketing from an ethical perspective was observed. Importantly, however, the study’s findings suggest that industry-specific advertising regulations bear little impact on fan perspectives.

The study’s results bear notable implications for marketing theory and practice: for ambushing brands, this suggests that they are rather less likely to be have a disruptive effect on events and their official sponsors. For official sponsors, a level of threat from ambushers nevertheless remains as it would appear consumers do not have strong views about the practice of ambushing.

The study’s methods build upon and extend previous studies into consumer attitudes towards ambush marketing, specifically focusing on the perceptions and affect of fans in lieu of more empirically generalisable consumer populations. Given the target audiences of sponsors and ambush marketers, this emphasis on fan attitudes represents an important direction in ambush affect research.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of event-related sports sponsorship and ambushing activity using social media video advertising that aim to affect spectators’ implicit and explicit brand information processing.

A dual model of brand knowledge is used that considers the implicit and explicit information processing of marketing-induced brand messages. A web study was conducted prior to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Each participant implicitly and explicitly evaluated either one sponsor brand or one ambush brand before and after watching the video advertisement (within-subject design). A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to evaluate each change of the pre-post testing scores.

Implicit and explicit brand associations as well as brand behavior were partially affected by the short contact with the advertisements of sponsor brands and ambush brands. In this regard, the implicit association measurements were more sensitive to reveal changes in the brand knowledge structure than their explicit counterparts. Furthermore, sponsorship advertising was slightly more effective than ambush advertising.

The current exploratory study evaluated for the first time the performance of event-related video advertisements that were originally released on social media of sponsor brands and ambush brands. The findings emphasize the necessary requirement of evaluating the implicit processing in addition to the explicit processing of sponsorship information to ensure a holistic evaluation of consumers’ memory with regard to the effectiveness of a sponsorship activity.

This study explores why consumers view ambush marketing as an ethical marketing approach.

A qualitative study was devised to investigate what ambush marketing means to those consumers who find it ethical or are not annoyed by it. Data were collected via focus groups.

Three main themes emerged from the data analyses. The most dominant theme was Machiavellianism. Favorable evaluations of ambush marketing lean on a Machiavellistic understanding. The second was the Robin Hood effect, which is observed when the ambusher is a smaller or local brand. In the third theme, ambush attacks are considered as charismatic or enjoyable action, in what is termed dark charisma.

Findings of the current study suggest considerable implications both for businesses that deal with sponsorship and for organizing committees.

The extant literature on consumers' attitudes toward ambush marketing mostly focuses on ethical issues and/or the effectiveness of ambush marketing (i.e. harm to official sponsors), using qualitative techniques. However, the literature is devoid of studies exploring consumers' perception on ambush marketing, and more specifically, explanations of what is ethical and unethical from consumers' point of view. To best of the author's knowledge, it is the first study that seeks an explanation about consumers' positive evaluation of ambush marketing.

Charities depend on giving behaviors of organizations to fulfil their purpose, whereas corporations seek to improve their image in return. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to investigate optimal donation thresholds for organizations to enhance their corporate social responsibility (CSR) image.

Experiment 1 (N = 482) tests whether CSR image improves with donation amount up to the point at which it becomes excessive (H1) and whether this point differs between firms in a positive versus negative economic situation (H2). Experiment 2 (N = 432) examines the role of consumer attribution of firm motives through mediation of these effects (H3), while also exploring consumer donation expectations by testing an “undefined” amount. Experiment 3 (N = 400) validates the role of attributions through the moderating effect of motives.

The experiments demonstrate an optimal interval between inferior and superior donation amounts that maximize the impact of corporate giving on CSR image through the attribution of society-serving motives. Furthermore, the economic situation of the company alters these thresholds – higher donations are required to positively influence the CSR image when the company is in a favorable situation.

This research answers a long-term call to provide more reliable tools on which to base charitable giving decisions. It also identifies perceived donating motives as the psychological process underlying consumers’ response to donation magnitudes.

The authors determine psychological donation thresholds by examining amounts perceived as insignificant in comparison to excessive and provide managers with an easy-to-implement method to determine optimal donation amounts from their target market.

By examining charitable giving at the micro-level, this research provides practical advice to companies on how to determine, ahead of time, how much to donate and what exactly to communicate in which economic situation.

This paper brings together new and existing resource material to provide a detailed profile of the regulatory environments affecting the practice of public relations in the UK, Italy and South Africa. It is hoped that by contextualising the social, political and economic factors specific to each country, readers will be more acutely aware of similarities and differences between PR practices in each country. This approach aims to help drive PR policy development by providing a useful template for further national and continental PR regulatory environment mapping.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into nine sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution; Sundry.

In order to deal with increasingly dynamic environments, organizations are rethinking the structure of their management systems. The recent literature suggests that, to a greater extent than before, new paradigms of management are being considered as alternatives to traditional forms of organization. One such transformational entity is total quality management (TQM). Statistical process controls, customer satisfaction and a culture supportive of change represent the underlying framework of the TQM system. There are numerous reports of organizations which have successfully made the transition to first‐time quality. On the other hand, many organizations struggle with change. The author spent a nine‐month sabbatical as a change agent in an organization attempting to incorporate TQM. He describes his role in the change programme, discusses the history of the organization, provides a summary of the TQM intervention, and, based on his observations, offers a critical analysis of the reasons that hindered the organization’s ability to implement TQM. Finally, intervention strategies to consider when dealing with adversity are discussed.