Abstract
Sports sponsorship is big business, and a great deal of research provides evidence as to sponsorship’s efficacy in achieving a large range of communication goals, particularly for brands that are perceived as fitting well with the sport by the most involved fans. A developing body of literature, however, suggests that fan passion for a favorite team or athlete might work against the sponsors of hated rivals. The current research contributes to the rivalry effects topic by examining the impact of sponsor-sport fit, business rivalry, and league sponsoring on “home” team fan attitudes towards the sponsors of their team’s main rival. The study finds that negative rivalry effects are particularly severe when the rival team sponsor has high-perceived fit with the sport and is a direct business rival to a “home” team sponsor, but that league sponsorships largely mitigate these rivalry effects.
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Notes
To confirm the pre-test results showing no significant attitudinal differences between the test brands, data was also collected with press releases that reversed the sponsoring brands (i.e., Gatorade and SAP as rival sponsors), and no significant differences were found in the results. Thus, for reasons of parsimony, only the Powerade and Oracle as rival sponsor results are reported, but details on the reversed brand data results are available upon request.
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Olson, E.L. Are rival team fans a curse for home team sponsors? The moderating effects of fit, oppositional loyalty, and league sponsoring. Mark Lett 29, 115–122 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-017-9441-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-017-9441-6