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This study investigates Chinese consumers' responses to foreign and domestic sponsors engaged in the Beijing Olympic Games. It identifies direct causal relationships between consumer ethnocentrism, attitudes towards the sponsor and product judgement. Findings reveal that event involvement mediates the positive relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and attitudes towards the domestic sponsor. Attitudes towards foreign sponsors are found to be a significant mediator in the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and judgements of the sponsors' products. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Endorsement of a brand or sports team by a sports celebrity has been thoroughly researched within the context of sports marketing. However, the recent phenomenon of non-sports celebrities owning sports teams has received little research attention. This study uses a survey of Indian respondents in the context of a major sport (cricket) in India to explore the impact of a non-sports celebrity owning and endorsing a sports team on consumer attitudes towards the team and their sponsors. Findings indicate that the level of credibility assigned to the celebrity significantly affects consumer attitudes towards the team and its sponsors. The results suggest that managers of sports teams and their sponsors should consider a celebrity owner as an endorser, as long as that celebrity has high credibility.

This paper tests and validates a conceptual model linking the attachment points, team identification, attitude towards the team sponsors and the behavioural intentions in the context of Indian Premier League (IPL), while testing for the moderating effects of age and gender.

Data were collected from 1,053 participants through both online and offline survey and then analyzed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM).

Attachment points influence the formation of team identification, which, in turn, affect the attitude towards the team sponsors. Attitude towards the team sponsors influence the behavioural intentions. Player attachment influences team identification the most. Age and gender have a moderating effect on the constructs of the study. Team identification in females is stronger because of attachment to sports, whereas males have stronger team identification based on player attachment. Males have a stronger intention to spread positive word of mouth (WOM) about sponsor products as compared to the female respondents. The younger age group of less than 21 years has more intention to spread positive WOM compared to the other age groups considered in the study.

This study contributes towards sports sponsorship research and the paradigms of social identity and attachment theories. Moreover, it will also help the marketers (sponsors) in IPL to strategically market their brands.

This is the first study to investigate the impact of attachment points on sponsorship outcomes in the context of IPL. Further, it is also the first to investigate the purchase intentions and WOM for the team sponsors in IPL. The multi-group analysis results will provide insights into marketers to better understand IPL viewers' segments and their behaviour.

This study aims to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with the sponsored posts on consumer-generated content, specifically blogs.

This paper empirically tested the proposed hypotheses using the structural equation modelling using a sample of 399 blog users.

The need for cognition, perceived interactivity and perceived credibility of blogs has been found to directly influence consumers’ attitude towards blogs. Innovativeness has been found to have a weak negative link with the attitude towards blogs. Blog users were more favourable towards the sponsored posts if the blogs were more interactive. Attitude towards blogs has been found to mediate the relationship between users’ perceived interactivity and their avoidance of the sponsored posts and also between perceived credibility and avoidance of the sponsored posts on blogs. The most significant finding of this study is that the positive attitude towards a blog results in a higher avoidance of the sponsored posts.

This study focuses on the sponsored posts on blogs. It does not look at other forms of advertising on blogs such as banner ads, or other forms of consumer-generated content.

Marketers and bloggers should carefully consider the suitability of the sponsored posts on blogs as they risk alienating the regular users of the blogs. Sponsored posts which are perceived as honest reviews (as opposed to paid advertorials) might be more acceptable to blog users.

This study highlights the importance of credibility of bloggers to blog users. There are some serious ethical issues related to the sponsored posts which have not been discussed here but need to be examined further.

This study represents one of the first attempts to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with customer-generated advertising – sponsored posts. It contributes to marketing literature by enhancing the understanding of how consumers perceive consumer-generated content and more specifically, with regard to consumer attitudes towards online consumer-generated advertising. This study enhances the theoretical and empirical knowledge on how consumers react to advertisements on social media, with important suggestions for future research and implications for practitioners.

This research examines the fan-team-sponsor relationship. It focuses on how the sports team's response to negative sponsor behaviour affects fan/spectator attitudes towards the sponsor. Results indicate that highly identified fans have significantly more positive attitudes towards the team sponsor than fans who are lower in identification. Highly identified fans informed of a negative action by a team sponsor felt more favourably towards the sponsor if the team continued, rather than terminated, their relationship with the sponsor.

This study contributes to continuing work on the development of a conceptual framework to better understand sponsorship, consumer response towards sponsorship efforts, and the contribution of sponsorship to customer-based brand equity, by seeking to validate a set of consumer-related attitudes to sponsorship. In particular, the study focuses on establishing the properties of consumer-related attitudinal constructs in the context of sponsorship of an annual national sporting event, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union's National Provincial Championship. Such constructs and their embedded scales will enable sponsorship managers to assess and distinguish consumer reactions to the event itself, to the commercialisation of the event, and to identify the consumer behaviours likely to benefit the sponsor of the event.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically verify the conventional cause‐and‐effect relationship of fan identification and purchase intention in the context of Asian fans when both the sponsoring firm and the sponsored team are Western. The paper also proposes and examines the mediating role of sponsor credibility and attitude towards sponsor in the relationship between fan identification and purchase intention.

A field study was conducted in Bangkok, Thailand, where 350 questionnaires were collected from football fans.

The findings reveal that, even when both the sponsoring firm and the sponsored sports team are western (i.e. foreign), Asian fans’ identification with the team increases their purchase intention for sponsoring firm's goods. The research also confirms that sponsor credibility and attitude towards sponsors partially mediate the fan identification‐purchase link.

The paper provides valuable insights into the under‐researched aspect of sports sponsorship, by examining the effect on Asian fans’ purchase intension when both the sponsoring firm and the sponsored sports team are western. Moreover, most of the prior literature on sports sponsorship focuses on the direct effect of fan identification on purchase intention. The current study extends the scope of knowledge on sports sponsorship by focusing on the under‐researched but crucial mediating effects of sponsor credibility and attitude towards sponsor.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a possible negative spillover effect in sports sponsorship to answer whether the sponsored team’s poor performance will have a negative effect on audiences’ trust in its sponsor’s brand. The authors further analysed whether the audience’s attitude towards the team plays a mediating role and whether the audience’s personality type (active vs passive) plays a moderating role in this negative spillover effect.

Three experimental studies were conducted with 380 Chinese undergraduates and MBA student participants over two years. The authors designed the experiment as a computer-mediated intervention in which good, poor and neutral performance groups were compared. After the respondents were exposed to the intervention, we asked them to answer questions using a computer terminal. We analysed the data from the three experiments through analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression analysis and a bootstrap.

The audiences who were exposed to a team’s poor performance condition reported less trust in the sponsor’s brand relative to those exposed to a good performance condition, and the brand trust was even lower than for those who were exposed to a control condition (no performance information). Further, the audience’s negative attitude towards the sports team mediated the negative effect of the team’s poor performance on its sponsor’s brand trust. The negative effect was more obvious for individuals with Type A personalities (active) than for those with Type B personalities (passive).

The prior literature has neglected a possible negative effect of a sports team’s performance on its sponsor’s brand trust. In particular, questions of whether, how and when this negative effect occurs are critical for sponsors, teams, and audiences. Since sports team sponsorship is burgeoning in China, the negative implications are unclear in this new context. Thus, the revelation that the negative spillover effects of a team’s poor performance on audiences’ trust in the sponsor’s brand provides two original contributions. First, the negative effect reveals value for multiple sponsorship stakeholders. Second, the Chinese context in this study adds value for future research and practice regarding both Chinese-foreign and domestic Chinese decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on sponsorship‐linked marketing and to present a set of research propositions.

The approach to the research propositions was to explore the existing literature to discover areas where opportunities for further research exist.

The authors propose that not only does sponsorship‐linked marketing influence attitudes towards the sponsor, but that the relationship is that of an S‐shaped curve where the incremental impact of sponsorship is slight for brands with very little or very strong attitudes established towards the brand. The most dramatic influence that sponsorship‐linked marketing will have is for those sponsors with a moderate amount of established brand attitude. The authors also present an argument that extreme congruity or extreme incongruity will drive brand awareness more dramatically than an expected level of sponsor‐property congruity, thus suggesting a U‐shaped relationship between awareness and congruency. Moreover, while an extremely incongruent partnership may gain widespread attention, it is unlikely to positively influence an emotional or behavioral response for either the property or sponsor.

The majority of the previous literature regarding sponsorship‐linked marketing proposed or assumed a linear relationship between current brand attitudes and the impact of a sponsorship. This paper suggests that this relationship is actually non‐linear and is, in fact, an S‐shaped relationship. Further, while congruency was believed to be linearly related to awareness, this paper proposes that the association between awareness and congruency is a U‐shaped phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model for exploring the recall and recognition of embedded advertisements of sponsors.

To verify the proposed conceptual model on a particular sports competition, a questionnaire related to the UEFA Champions League sponsors in the season 2016/2017 was designed. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results provided support to the claim that higher involvement in a sport and higher exposure to a sponsored event lead to higher recall and recognition of embedded advertisements. Conversely, the same two factors alongside sponsor awareness do not affect the attitude towards sponsors. On the other hand, sponsor awareness and attitude towards sponsors have a direct positive role on the future purchase intention of sponsor products/services.

The findings illustrate that to maximise the effectiveness of their embedded advertisements, sponsors should not merely concentrate on brand awareness, but should go beyond and attempt to improve the consumers’ positive perception of their products and services. Moreover, by sponsoring a sport event, the sponsors can be sure that their message will be effectively transmitted to the ones who are fans of the sport and the sponsored competition.

The present study empirically explores the factors which influence the recall and recognition of embedded advertisements and how the achieved level of sponsorship awareness impacts purchase intentions.