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Given the public availability of secondary data on investments in events such as the Olympics, FIFA World Cup and professional sports, event studies that measure stock market response to these investments have grown. Previous findings are mixed, however, with some studies suggesting that the announcement of sponsorship contracts is a positive event and others finding detrimental effects of the announcement on shareholder value. This study aims to analyze the mixed findings from event studies in sport sponsorship to determine if sponsorship announcements influence stock market response.

The meta-analysis examines more than 20 years of research on event studies in sponsorship (34 studies).

The overall results show a positive, but non-significant effect of partnership deal announcements on shareholder wealth. Further analysis considers the effects of sponsorship announcements by each type of event window to see the impact of the announcement relative to time (pre-announcement, announcement day, post-announcement and pre- to post-announcement). This closer examination of the event window shows that stock prices of sponsoring organizations increased in the pre-announcement window.

Quantitative meta-analytic findings indicate that information about sponsorship deals appears to leak to share markets and positively influence share price. This finding suggests that sponsoring the sports and events found in these event studies is seen as value enhancing for sponsoring firms.

The global outbreak of the COVID-19 forced most sport leagues to cancel games in March–April 2020, leaving no sport games to watch for sport fans. The present study examined how sport consumers appraise stress and engage in coping behaviors resulted from sport lockout due to the global pandemic.

This study examined the relationship between sport fans’ psychological dispositions, threat appraisal and coping strategies among professional sport fans in the USA. A panel of sport fans (N = 446) representative of the US adult population participated in an online survey in the fourth week of April, 2020 when no major sport leagues made a return from the lockout due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Results of this present study showed that anger, aggressiveness and need for affiliation increased threat perceptions toward the COVID-19 lockout, which subsequently had significant effect on emotion-focused and disengagement coping behaviors.

This is the first empirical study that examined stress and coping behavior among sport fans in the global public health crisis context. Our findings show what triggers stress appraisals and how fans cope with them.

Findings suggest that segmenting sport fans based on psychological dispositions could be useful in predicting fans that will engage in coping behaviors.

While the hope is to return to normal postpandemic, COVID-19 might not be the last. We are uncertain whether there might be another potential pandemic-related sport lockdown. Understanding how lack of sport events can create distress in sport fans and have important public health implications.

The findings provide empirical evidence on how sport consumers respond to the pandemic-related sport lockdown and cope with the unprecedented situation. The findings of this study contribute to the sport management literature as we are unsure whether the sport industry might face this challenging situation in the future again.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how consumers value sports team-branded merchandise. Two experiments are conducted to examine the effects of rivalry and team identification on evaluations of licensed product (Study 1). Study 2 examined the effects of team brand cue, team performance priming and product category on licensed product evaluations.

Study 1 (N = 104) examined the effects of team rivalry and team identification on multidimensional product values and purchase intent. In Study 2, a 3 (performance priming: positive/negative/neutral) × 2 (team brand cue: present/absent) × 2 (product category: symbolic/utilitarian) between-subjects design (N = 285) was utilized. Samples were recruited from students and alumni at a large Midwestern university in the USA. A series of multivariate analysis of covariance was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Fans view a product licensed with a rival team’s logo to have significantly less functional, emotional and social value than a product licensed with their favorite team’s logo. Highly identified fans showed greater bias in evaluating the product than less identified fans. Team performance priming also moderated the effect of team brand cues on purchase intentions toward the licensed product.

Team identification level accentuates bias in valuations of a licensed product. In addition, better performance of a team further motivates purchase decisions. Use of a collegiate brand in this study limits generalizability of the findings.

Practitioners should realize that simple heuristic cues can change consumers’ perceptions of licensed merchandise product values.

The current study extends previous research on licensed product valuation by using multidimensional value propositions and a variety of product-related cues.

This paper aims to outline the role of brands as relationship builders and to offer a better understanding of the recent developments and key literature in the area of consumer–brand relationships.

This paper is an editorial based mainly on a literature review on consumer–brand relationships. It uses the sentiment range and passion intensity to position various brand relationship constructs. This work follows the same bibliometric-analysis approach used by Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) and looked for publications in the Web of Science on brand relationships, with reference to Fournier’s (1998) seminal work and data collected for the period between January 2010 and November 2018.

First, this work presents the key consumer–brand relationship terms and positions the work on brand love, brand like, brand hate, brand dislike and brand indifference. In addition, the bibliometric analysis offers a number of insights into the current state of the academic research in the area of consumer–brand relationships, including a clear indication that the research on consumer–brand relationships is increasing.

This work and the whole special issue together help in the understanding of brands as relationship builders, clearly explaining the continuum from strong positive or negative relationships with brands to no relationship with brands and the current state of research in the area.