FiT Publishing

This research takes a psychological approach to measuring social media engagement in sport by applying the consumer brand engagement (CBE) in social media scale. We collected two samples to evaluate the psycho- metric properties of the CBE scale in a professional sport team context. After finding the CBE scale reliable and valid in both samples, we explored its impact on relationship quality, purchase intentions, and referral intentions. We found that an increase in CBE leads to an increase in relationship quality and subsequent purchase and referral intentions. After testing an...Read more

Despite a wealth of team identification research, little scholarship has focused on how considerable changes to a team’s performance may impact the meaning of the team identity (as such a meaning is understood/exposited by in-group members). To this end, we examined fans of a historically poor-performing team that had reversed course, becoming a winner. We conducted semi-structured interviews with supporters of Major League Baseball’s (MLB’s) Chicago Cubs to explore how the team’s 2016 World Series (i.e., championship) win had impacted supporters’ identification with the team. We noted two...Read more

While the effects of sport sponsorship are widely researched, many studies suffer from a lack of generalizability and are oftentimes cross-sectional, given the challenges inherent in the collection and analysis of longitudinal data. This study seeks to remedy these issues by analyzing a longitudinal, heterogeneous dataset comprised of more than 500 sponsorships of North American sport leagues spanning 14 years. Results reveal an 8% increase in brand recognition in the first year following the initiation of the sponsorship. However, lagged variables indicate that the effect is reduced...Read more

The aim of the current research was to identify consumer needs that significantly influenced daily fantasy sports (DFS) consumption. Specifically, we sought to predict DFS participation intention and information search. Existence, relatedness, and growth (ERG) theory and self-determination theory (SDT) served as theoretical inspirations for need selection. Th e needs included were needs for autonomy, arousal, uniqueness, status, achievement, competence, and relatedness. The results of the current study indicate that autonomy and achievement needs are important for DFS consumers....Read more

Social media has become an important frontier in the sport sponsorship paradigm (Dees, 2011), offering brands a powerful mechanism to stimulate consumer engagement (Vale & Fernandes, 2018). Despite this potential, the extent to which social media content, as part of a sport sponsorship’s leveraging activities, can yield consumer engagement behaviors is unknown. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of integrating sponsors into the social media posts of sport organizations on fan engagement. A total of 13,542 Instagram posts from four professional sports teams were...Read more

The aim is to advance the understanding of how brand-property congruence and articulation strategy influence the perception of jersey sponsorships and how consumer-level factors such as team identification affect sponsorship outcomes. Different types of fi t and sponsor categories were tested to determine the most effective type of fi t as determined by outcomes of attitude toward team and sponsor, sponsor patronage, and perceptions of team and sponsor social responsibility. With a pretest (n=154) and two experiments (n=169, n=172), results indicated sponsors with a functional-based fit...Read more

When the Charlotte Bobcats became the Charlotte Hornets at the beginning of the 2014 NBA season, the team became the first in history to rebrand itself with a moniker previously used and recently dropped by another NBA franchise. Despite being bound by NBA branding and merchandising rules, the organization was able to re-imagine the original Hornets brand to create a new distinct brand identity that pushed the organization into the future while still honoring the past. The franchise employed a variety of creative brand communication techniques, including sending Hugo the Hornet mascot door...Read more

The United States, sport marketers are faced with challenges of capturing the interest and altering the consumption patterns of this important minority group. A primary objective of this research was to determine if African American participants would perceive a greater overall fit with a baseball advertisement if the actors and settings shown in the advertisement resembled their racial and cultural identities. Existing literature on the match-up hypothesis and theory of reasoned action guided this research and aided in hypothesis development. Two-hundred eighty-three African American...Read more

The use of online data collection techniques in sport marketing research has increased in recent years. The value of data obtained this way is determined, in part, by the quality of survey response. Scholars have studied strategies that enhance survey response, including the use of notification and topic salience. However, empirical support for the use of notification has been obtained primarily from mail-based survey research, so it is unclear if the benefits would be evident with online data collection. This study examined the influence of notification techniques and topic salience,...Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in American Needle v. National Football League is not the “death knell” of collective licensing agreements in sports, but it will hold the NFL and other professional sports entities to a higher level of antitrust scrutiny than they had hoped. The issue in American Needle v. National Football League was whether the NFL’s collective licensing arm, NFL Properties, LLC (NFLP), was a single entity, and therefore, exempt from antitrust liability under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Section 1 deems “[e]very contract, combination in the form of a...Read more