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The purpose of this research is to extend current knowledge regarding rivalry communication among sport consumers to better understand how rivals behave with one another when they communicate.

This national survey of US sport consumers used a novel approach to explore whether and with whom rivals discuss National Football League (NFL) game outcomes. The survey captured both uniplex and multiplex data by asking respondents to name rival discussants with whom they had recently interacted, and the fan behaviors they exchanged with those named rival discussants.

Through use of this novel data collection approach, new findings were uncovered related to blasting, glory out of reflective failure, schadenfreude and the influence of team identification on the exchange of rivalry fan behaviors. The results of the uniplex and multiplex data analyses uniquely showcase the ways in which social identity theory combines with team identification to enact rivalry behavior.

This research is the first to precisely dichotomize the psychological antecedents from the communicated behavior between rival fans. Results reveal the precise ways in which team identification influences discordant communication between rival fans, which differs from past research in an interesting new way.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how reference to a rival or favorite sports team within cause-related sports marketing (CRSM) campaigns affects fans’ intentions to support the cause. The purpose of the studies is to assess the perils of featuring a specific team in league-wide activations of cause-related marketing.

The research comprises three experiments. Study 1 employs CRSM advertising to test fans’ responses when rival or hometown team imagery is featured by Major League Baseball (MLB). Studies 2 and 3 utilize a press release to activate a cause partnership in MLB and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and assess the potential influence of team involvement and schadenfreude toward the rival team.

Contrary to previous research, results demonstrate that rival team presence in league-wide activation can reduce intentions to support the cause effort across both leagues, but not in all circumstances. The influence of rival team exposure on perceived sincerity is moderated by team involvement with the cause in MLB, but not the NBA. However, sincerity consistently enhances cause support across all studies. While conditional effects of schadenfreude are noted, it is not a significant moderator of cause support.

This research exposes the nuance of league-wide CRSM activations. Specifically, the rival team effect on perceived sincerity seems to be league dependent, and subject to team involvement with the cause. Moreover, these results are limited to the leagues studied.

League administrators and their cause-related partners should exercise due diligence when promoting their affiliation using specific teams and levels of involvement with the cause.

These studies produce results that differ from the limited prior research within the domain of league-wide CRSM, and therefore advance the conversation regarding how best to activate such campaigns.

Previous research on rivalry games in sport has predominantly focused on understanding the nature of these games and their effects on consumer behavior. As such, the purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical examination to provide better theoretical and empirical understanding of how rivalries may impact the posting of content online.

This research utilizes Twitter data measuring the number of posts by individuals about college football teams to model how often fans create content during game days. The models in this study were estimated using fixed-effects panel regressions.

After controlling for a number of factors, including the type of rivalry game, results indicate fans post more during traditional rivalries. Furthermore, newer rivalry games had less impact on the amount of content posted about a team.

The findings from this research provide sport marketers with important information regarding fan use of digital platforms. Notably, the results suggest rivalries can help to boost the volume of content individuals post about a team, indicating these games provide teams with an opportunity to maximize their engagement with fans and focus on key marketing objectives.

To date, there has been little examination considering whether rivalries affect behaviors in the digital realm. Therefore, the current investigation is one of the first studies to examine how rivalries impact social media behavior.

This study, an empirical research, aims to construct and validate a new love-hate scale for sports fans and tested its antecedents and consequences.

The scale was designed and validated in three separate empirical survey studies in the context of Israeli professional basketball. In Phase 1, the authors verified the factorial validity of the proposed scale using exploratory factor analysis. In Phase 2, the authors conducted a confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modeling. In Phase 3, the authors tested the nomological network validity of the scale.

The findings show that fans' involvement, loyalty and fandom significantly predicted their love–hate, which in turn significantly predicted self-reported fan aggression, fans' acceptance of fan aggression, price premium and frequency of watching games.

The model was tested on a relatively small sample of fans within a single country. This lack of generalizability should be addressed in future studies by examining the model in other sports contexts and countries.

This study suggests that understanding the properties of the love–hate measure may assist team sports clubs in identifying, preventing and controlling potential fan aggression.

The study provides three incremental contributions above and beyond existing research: it develops and validates a scale for measuring the phenomenon of sports fans' love and hate as mixed emotions; it makes it possible to capture the variations in the magnitude of fans' love–hate; and it relates fans' love–hate to important attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

This study aims to demonstrate that feelings of resentment, fueled by perceptions of injustice, underlie the formation of rivalries. Further, this study analyzes how consumers evaluate the two brands that participate in a rivalry relationship.

The research uses four experiments. Study 1 uses two conditions to test whether injustice predicts inter-personal rivalries through resentment. Study 2 uses a one-factor design with three levels (resentment vs contempt vs control) to examine the underlying mechanism of resentment on the formation of a rivalry. Study 3 analyzes the effect of brand rivalries on consumers’ brand attitudes. Study 4 uses a 2 (Temporal-focus: past vs future) × 2 (competitive relationship: resentment vs control) between-subjects experimental design, to test the moderating effects of temporal-focus on consumer brand rivalry perceptions. This experiment replicates the effects of brand rivalries on consumer brand attitudes.

Rivalries have an essential emotional component – resentment – that is fueled by injustice and leads consumers to form more favorable attitudes toward the brand that consumers perceive is treated unfairly (target brand) and more unfavorable attitudes toward the brand that is perceived to treat the other brand unfairly (the rival brand). A future-focused mindset attenuates consumer perceptions of brand rivalries, whereas a past-focused mindset enhances these effects.

Prior research has failed to identify the emotional components of rivalries and their effects on consumer choices. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that reveals how attitudes change when consumers are exposed to a brand rivalry.

The growing proportion of older fans and their potential economic value have increased the need for an improved understanding of age differences in fan behaviour. Building on socioemotional selectivity theory, the current study examines the impact of age differences on fan hatred as well as on the extent to which fans actually engage in aggressive activities and fans' perceptions of the levels of appropriateness of certain physical and verbal acts of aggression.

The study used an online panel-based survey that offered access to a real-world population of sport fans. The participants were 742 fans of professional football (soccer).

Results from structural equation modelling indicated that older fans reported lower levels of fan hatred, lower self-reported aggression and lower acceptance of physical and verbal aggression. Moreover, fan hatred partially mediated the relationship between age and levels of aggression and between age and acceptance of verbal aggression. In addition, fan hatred fully mediated the relationship between age and acceptance of physical aggression.

The current study makes two important contributions. First, it demonstrates that sport clubs may particularly benefit from understanding the potential but often neglected importance of older sport fans in relation to the problematic phenomenon of fan aggression. Second, it offers a thorough theoretical account of the manner in which fan hatred plays a significant role in the relationships between age and fan aggressiveness.

The achievement of a requisite return on investment (ROI) from a brand’s investment in sponsorships of sport events is becoming increasingly important. Consequently, evolving trends in the consumption of the live television broadcasts of such events (e.g. increased usage of second screens by consumers) are an important consideration. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of second screen use during sport broadcast consumption on important marketing outcomes (i.e. brand awareness and the perceived value and intrusiveness of sponsor brand integration), and whether effectiveness is dependent on the consumer’s level of identification with the sport being broadcast.

A 2×2 (experimental/control and high SportID/low SportID) between-subjects experimental design featuring the broadcast of a sport event as the stimuli was utilized to examine a potential interaction effect between sport identification and second screen use on three dependent variables important for sport sponsors.

Results confirmed that those with a high level of sport identification realized significantly higher levels of brand awareness for sponsors integrated into the broadcast. However, when consumers were asked to engage in second screen use, the experiment revealed a moderating effect of sport identification on the impact of second screen use, for both brand awareness and the perceived value of the brand integration.

Consumers with higher levels of sport identification are an important target of sport sponsorship activities by brand marketers. Given this, the implication that second screen use can reduce the effectiveness of important sponsorship-related outcomes such as brand awareness is a sobering result for marketers expecting a positive ROI from sponsorships of sport events.

Negativity towards a brand is typically conceived as a significant problem for brand managers. This paper aims to show that negativity towards a brand can represent an opportunity for companies when brand polarization occurs. To this end, the paper offers a new conception of the brand polarization phenomenon and reports exploratory findings on the benefits of consumers’ negativity towards brands in the context of brand polarization.

To develop a conception of brand polarization, the paper builds on research on polarizing brands and extends it by integrating insights from systematic literature reviews in three bodies of literature: scholarship on brand rivalry and, separately, polarization in political science and social psychology. Using qualitative data from 22 semi-structured interviews, the paper explores possible advantages of brand polarization.

This paper defines the brand polarization phenomenon and identifies multiple perspectives on brand polarization. Specifically, the findings highlight three distinct parties that can benefit from brand polarization: the polarizing brand as an independent entity; the brand team behind the polarizing brand; and the passionate consumers involved with the polarizing brand. The data reveal specific advantages of brand polarization associated with the three parties involved.

Managers of brands with a polarizing nature could benefit from having identified a group of lovers and a group of haters, as this could allow them to improve their focus when developing and implementing the brands’ strategies.

This exploratory study is the first explicitly focusing on the brand polarization phenomenon and approaches negativity towards brands as a potential opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the most relevant innovation strategies used by the Latin American national tennis federations as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The methodology consists of a survey. The survey consisted of three sections apart from the consent one: a general descriptive part, one with 30 questions to assess attitudes and perceptions and a final section which included open questions. After the data were collected, the SPSS software was used to test the distribution of the sample.

Results show that executives' perception toward their need for involvement in the decision-making process varies.

The first limitation relates to the sample size of executives who completed the questionnaire. The second limitation refers to the details provided in the open section of the questionnaire. Specifically, the space allocated for the answers and the degree of detail required could have been optimized by providing further instructions on the importance of facilitating information related to the implementation of the programs.

The results demonstrate that, although traditional management, organizational and administrative behaviors are still present in the tennis ecosystem, a more innovative mentality should embed these organizations. It is then relevant that sport and tennis organizations commit to the implementation of innovative strategies for the optimization of the administration of their ecosystems.

The paper adds more understanding to the brand of sports management. Furthermore, the fact of developing the study in a COVID-19 context sheds light on the issues faced by sports in a pandemic like this one.

El propósito de este artículo es discutir algunas de las estrategias de innovación utilizadas por las federaciones nacionales latinoamericanas como respuesta a la pandemia COVID-19.

La metodología consiste en una entrevista. La entrevista se dividió en tres secciones además de la de consentimiento: una parte descriptiva, otra con 30 preguntas que evaluaban las actitudes y percepciones, y una sección final que incluía preguntas abiertas. Después de que la información fuera recogida, se utilizó el software SPSS para comprobar la distribución de la muestra.

Los resultados sugieren que las organizaciones analizadas han utilizado diversas estrategias de innovación durante este periodo sin precedentes. Estas estrategias se han aplicado en áreas como la información, la participación, la comunicación y la digitalización.

The first limitations related to the sample size of executives who completed the questionnaire. The second limitation refers to the details provided in the open section of the questionnaire. Specifically, the space allocated for the answers and the degree of detail required could have been optimized by providing further instructions on the importance of facilitating information related to the implementation of the programs.

La primera limitación está relacionada con el tamaño de la muestra de los ejecutivos que completaron el cuestionario. La segunda limitación se refiere a la información que se proporciona en la primera sección del cuestionario. Específicamente, el espacio donde se sitúan las respuestas y el grado de detalle requerido podrían haber sido optimizados a través de la provisión de instrucciones más detalladas sobre la importancia de facilitar la información relacionada con la implementación de los programas.

El estudio ayuda a la mejor comprensión de la gestión de los deportes. Además, el hecho de desarrollar el estudio en el contexto del COVID arroja luz a la problemática del deporte en el contexto de una pandemia como la actual.

The current study postulated that fans' social identities (derived from the team sport clubs of which they perceive themselves to be members) coexist with their personal identities (derived from views of themselves as unique, individual sport fans). The study examined the relationship between identity salience and both positive and negative aspects of fans' attitudes, emotions and behaviours.

Seven hundred and twelve (712) Israeli professional football fans participated in this study. The study employed a survey drawn from an Internet panel with more than fifty thousand members.

Utilizing structural equation modelling (SEM), the authors demonstrated that while social identity salience is related to positive aspects of being a sport fan (love of a favourite team and loyalty), it is also related to negative aspects of being a sport fan (hatred and perceptions of the appropriateness of fan aggression). Personal identity salience was found to be related to the decrease in negative outcomes of being a fan (hatred and perceptions of the appropriateness of fan aggression).

Marketers and sport organizations will benefit from stimulating sport fans' personal identity salience to mitigate possible negative consequences of team affiliation.

The current study expands upon past sport management studies by demonstrating the existence of relationships between sport fans' identity salience and their emotions, attitudes and behaviours. The identity salience of fans is relevant from both academic and applicative perspectives.