FiT Publishing

Sponsorship activity has increased dramatically over the last two decades, as has customer knowledge of this promotional activity associated with experiential consumption. While a number of studies have measured consumers’ understanding of how event marketing affects their evaluation of a brand, scant empirical attention has been paid to how consumers use sponsorships as signals of event quality. In a between-subjects experimental design, main effects were found for the sponsor’s functional similarity and regression analyses suggest that the strength of the sponsors’ influence predicted...Read more

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) unveiled a brand new logo for the upcoming 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil on July 8, 2010 (“Official Emblem,” n.d.). The Official Emblem of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, called Inspiration, features three victorious hands together raising the World Cup Trophy. Yellow and green are Brazilian colors and they dominate the design. The words 2014 FIFA World Cup Brasil complement the picture (see Figure 1). The official launch took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, three days before the final match of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. This high...Read more

No other team in sports has had to endure the relocation odyssey that the New Orleans franchise has lived through. The Hornets were born when North Carolina businessman George Shinn was awarded one of four NBA expansion franchises on April 1, 1987, and began play in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1988. As the owner of the team from its inception and the subsequent 14 seasons in Charlotte, Shinn officially filed an application with the NBA on January 17, 2002, to move the Hornets to New Orleans, Louisiana, beginning with the 2002-03 season. Four months later, the NBA’s Board of Governors...Read more

The career of David Beckham, celebrity soccer player, has had its highs and lows. But through it all, one thing has remained constant, David Beckham has rarely ventured out of the media or the public eye. For a decade, from his 1995 debut for Manchester United, his career went from strength to strength, his on-field brilliance matched only by his soaring marketing appeal in a sport that massively commercialized in the 1990s (Cashmore & Parker, 2003).Read more

Brand use is a critically important measure of business and marketing success (Allenby et al., 2002), and the search for empirical evidence explaining product or brand use is a major stream in marketing literature (Fennell, Allenby, Yang, & Edwards, 2003). Over the past century, research has examined the relationship among several variables (e.g., psychographics, age, gender, and other demographics) in an effort to better understand consumption rates and brand use (Shaw, 1912; Smith, 1956) so strategies can be developed to increase brand use...Read more

The public perception of a university’s athletic programs is often considered a primary factor in building the brand image of the respective institution. Maintaining a favorable brand image can have a significant impact when recruiting potential student athletes, when soliciting corporate partners, and when facilitating development opportunities with alumni and key stakeholders. Colleges and universities are becoming increasingly more entrepreneurial in nature as schools seek various strategies to generate additional revenues and exposure. For smaller universities not affiliated with a...Read more

The researchers utilize social identity theory to investigate the effect that athlete endorsers have on both brand and team-related attitudes and intentions. As fans identify more strongly with an athlete, the more they intend to purchase the endorsed products. Additionally, a fan’s level of identification with an athlete is positively transferred to their attitude toward the team. The influence of athlete ID on team abandonment was fully mediated through attitude toward the team. However, fans who identified less with the athlete endorser were more likely to abandon the team’s market...Read more

n a relatively short period of time, The Flying Pig Marathon has developed a reputation as a ...Read more

Vertical extension is a brand management technique that describes a process of introducing a new brand (i.e., product or service) at a higher or lower price and quality level. One such case is the National Basketball Development League (NBDL) that was launched by the National Basketball Association (NBA) in November 2001. Kim and Lavack (1996) studied the use of distancing techniques (i.e., ¡°linguistic¡± and/or ¡°graphical¡± manipulations) for successful introduction of vertical extensions (p. 29). The purpose of the present case study was to examine the use of those techniques with the...Read more