Are rival team fans a curse for home team sponsors? The moderating effects of fit, oppositional loyalty, and league sponsoring

Erik L. Olson ()
Additional contact information
Erik L. Olson: BI Norwegian Business School

Marketing Letters, 2018, vol. 29, issue 1, No 10, 115-122

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Sport sponsoring; League sponsoring; Rivalry effects; Fit; Oppositional loyalty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11002-017-9441-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:mktlet:v:29:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11002-017-9441-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... etailsPage=societies

DOI: 10.1007/s11002-017-9441-6

Access Statistics for this article

Marketing Letters is currently edited by Joel Steckel and Peter Golder

More articles in Marketing Letters from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().