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This research explores ambush marketing on social media during the 2018 Commonwealth Games held in Australia. Two social media platforms – Twitter and Instagram – served as the dataset to uncover how official sponsors of the Canadian and Australian Commonwealth Games teams were ambushed.

Employing a content analysis of all official team sponsors and their competitors, the study’s findings offer an original and multi-national look into social media ambushing.

Results indicated that promoting Games’ links was the most common social media post type used by official event sponsors, followed by sharing results of their endorsed athletes and behind-the-scenes information.

In an effort to provide connection to the event, posts by ambushers focused on promoting athletes endorsed by their brand. All ambushers were more likely to use Twitter to promote their endorsed athletes. Instagram, however, was not fully embraced in their ambush marketing.

Discussion and implications of the results provide sport marketers with information on how to leverage one’s link with a major sporting event.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of preventative counter-ambush marketing initiatives and rights protection strategies, providing an historical view of rights management and the International Olympic Committee’s sponsorship protection initiatives through ambush marketing’s formative years.

In examining the antecedents and implications of the Canadian Olympic Committee’s (COC) forward-thinking approach to ambush marketing protection, and to explore the development of preventative counter-ambush initiatives, an historical examination of IOC and COC policies and protocols regarding ambushing and sponsorship protection over a 30-year period was undertaken, informing the development of a proposed model of proactive commercial rights management.

The findings indicate that a progressive shift in the counter-ambush activities of major commercial rights holders may be underway: increasingly, the COC has stressed education and communication as key components of their commercial rights protection strategy, in lieu of enforcing the legal protection provided them by the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act of 2007. The resultant commercial rights management model proposed reflects this proactive approach, and illustrates the need for events and sponsorship stakeholders to Anticipate, (Re)Act and Advocate.

The study offers a contemporary perspective into counter-ambush strategies within the context of the COC’s brand protection measures and industry practice. The proactive approach to commercial rights management explored represents a significant step in ambush marketing prevention on the part of the COC.

The purpose of this paper is to present a qualitative research method using oral history interview data that may advance new types of methodological inquiry in management and organisation history research.

The method, the authors present, combines matrix and template analysis using oral histories from unstructured interviews with 31 senior managers in the UK individual personal pensions product market to illuminate how the construction of “matrices” and “templates” can then be compared and contrasted across different time periods, and at different units of analysis, to analyse complex temporal data.

The authors highlight the veracity of a combination of template and matrix analysis for researchers handling management and organisation history data.

Elaborations of new research methodologies suitable for handling historical data remain few and far between. The proposed method offers a new approach for handing temporal textual data.

The importance of networks has been established in the development of commerce and capitalism, with key concepts reflecting both the dynamic and permeable characteristics of networks. Such attributes are exemplified by religious networks, which have been typically dismissed in terms of economic contribution as being both risk-averse and bounded by ethical barriers imposed by theology. This paper aims to examine the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the long 18th century to evidence the multi-plexity and density of connections and suggest that adherence to the Quaker discipline acted as a trust-based attribute and substituted for repeated iteration.

The archival investigation centres upon an analysis of “The Catalogue of Quaker Writing” and a close re-reading of the seminal text “Quakers in Science and Industry”, an authoritative account of Quaker firms and families in industry and commerce. By identifying multiple possible social network connections in Raistrick’s work, this paper reviewed and analysed The Catalogue of Quaker Writing to examine the presence or absence of these connections in the Quaker network in the long 18th century.

This paper shows how the Quaker network was an unusually dense network that benefited co-religionists by enabling commerce through its unique topography. In a period characterized by the absence of formal institutional mechanisms to regulate behaviour, Quaker discipline acted as a quasi-regulatory mechanism to regulate membership of the network and to govern member moral behaviour.

The Quakers offer an opportunity to examine an early modern network to gain important insights into key aspects of network topography. By using social network analysis, this paper shows how Quakers performed a multiplicity of roles, which encouraged multiple modes of contact between members of the society in a dense network of contexts, which, in turn, provided high levels of connectedness between individuals. This unique range of roles, shared among a relatively small group of individuals, ensured that the degrees of separation between roles were very few; similarly, the plethora of connections resulted in a density, which not only allowed for multiple ways to engage with other individuals but also ensured no individual would become a bottle-neck or indeed a gateway that would prevent access. This unique topography was also highly unusual in that it was permeable to any aspirant member upon acceptance of the discipline – neither poverty nor lack of social status was barriers to membership. This unusual network offered atypical commercial advantages for its members.

This study explores the use of event-related promotional hashtags by non-sponsors as a form of social ambushing, akin to newsjacking, as potential means of ambushing major events and the potential challenges facing commercial rights holders.

Framed within the context of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, the present research takes a descriptive analytical approach to social media analysis. Social media data were accessed from Twitter's API across a six-week Games period and subsequently coded and categorized based upon strategic intent, content and key structural characteristics. A quantitative analysis of Tweet distribution, frequency and buzz was then conducted, providing insight into the impacts and effects of social ambushing via newsjacking.

Importantly, the study's findings suggest that whilst newsjacking by non-sponsors throughout the Games was pervasive, the potential reach and impact of such social ambushing may be limited. Non-sponsoring firms primarily adopted Games hashtags for behavioural or diversionary means, however consumer response to such attempts was minimal. These findings offer renewed perspective for scholars and practitioners on social ambushing and ambush marketing interventionism.

This research provides an important investigation into the manifestations and potential implications of social ambushing and illustrates the potential for brands to newsjack sporting events through unauthorized hashtag usage, necessary advances in sport marketing research.

The (de)regulation agenda of the Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979 is an important change point that has attracted only limited attention from management and historical research scholars. Thus, how (de)regulation in this era influenced the evolution of product design remains ripe for exploration. The purpose of this paper is to examine the UK individual personal pensions product market between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s to examine the relationship between (de)regulation – an industry-level factor – and its impact on architectural choices of product design – a product-level factor.

A retrospective, oral history research design with 31 senior managers in product development firms with first-hand experience of the change period was adopted.

Findings indicate that the (de)regulation reforms and the context of the financialisation of product markets came to define how products were then designed, evolving product design from non-modular to near-modular, a trajectory that arguably continues until the present day.

The main contribution lies in examining the role of (de)regulation and financialisation as modularisation processes. The increasing modularisation of individual personal pension product design between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s provides further support for the body of scholarly work on modularisation processes and their relationship with industry change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine international football supporter behaviours within the context of national and socio-cultural identification, in an effort to better understand what role national identity plays in fan motivation and consumer behaviour for expatriate and non-domestic fans.

International football supporters across ten cultural and ethnic communities were surveyed throughout the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup Finals, exploring the identification and new media socialisation behaviours of national team supporters in non-domestic markets.

The study’s findings provide evidence of the role identification plays in informing national and ethnic identities. Supporting one’s home or ancestral national team reflects an important element of national identification and socio-cultural place for expatriate or non-domestic supporters of international football. Importantly, new media behaviours provide supporters with a formative and productive source of national team fan engagement and ethnocultural community creation, particularly for younger target audiences.

These results bear particular significance for theory and practice: the digital socialisation behaviours supporters engage in are integral components of identity building and communication. In better understanding the awareness and interest of geographically detached sport consumers, this study offers new perspective into the opportunities present for sport organisations and marketers in reaching non-domestic fan nations.

The findings offer new perspective into the role national identification plays in fan involvement and motivation, and importantly how new media has emerged as a key platform for expatriate and non-domestic supporter socialisation amongst international football supporters.