Articles in this issue:

• Smart Sports Fans: Factors Influencing Sport Consumption on Smartphones

  Sylvia Chan-Olmsted and Min Xiao

  Smartphones are playing pivotal roles in sports fans’ media consumption journey. However, what motivates sports fans to use smartphones for sports; what are some of the behavioral factors that influence sports consumption on smartphones; how smartphone use for sports is related to other media usage; and how fandom interacts with motivational and behavioral factors still remains unclear to academic scholars. An online survey (n = 646) was conducted to uncover the factors influencing sports consumption on smartphones. The results revealed that the motivator of acquiring information related...Read more

• Nonlocal Fandom: Effects of Geographic Distance, Geographic Identity, and Local Competition on Team Identification

  Katherine R. N. Reifurth

  Matthew J. Bernthal

  Khalid Ballouli

  and Dorothy Collins

  Sports fans’ identification with their hometown is a very salient aspect of who they are, and thus, they are likely to be attracted to teams that represent the place they call “home.” Although recent sport marketing studies have shed light on the importance of home among fans, there is a void in the literature relative to “nonlocal fans.” This study aims to examine how geographic distance, geographic identity, and the presence of other local teams affect team identification for different types of nonlocal fans: displaced and nondisplaced fans. Nine hundred and twenty self-identified...Read more

• Corporate Sponsorship in College Football: An fMRI Study Measuring the Effectiveness of Corporate Branding Across Rival Teams

  David S. Martin

  Kyle M. Townsend

  Yun Wang

  and Gopikrishna Deshpande

  This research examines a phenomenon the authors have entitled “directional-contamination,” which is a consumer’s response to advertising branded with a rival team after advertising branded with the home team has been shown. Utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors exposed two groups of respondents, seven who identify as fans of a specific football team and eight who are not fans to marketing and promotional material that corporate sponsors currently use in their branding efforts. The authors compared the neural responses of the participants (n=15) to three...Read more

• Follower Segments Within and Across the Social Media Networks of Major Professional Sport Organizations

  Michael L. Naraine

  The purpose of this study was to identify segments within the social media networks of major professional sport organizations. Relational data were collected from the Twitter accounts of four major professional sport organizations based in Toronto, Canada. Users within these networks were subsequently parsed based upon their Twitter behavior (e.g., likes, retweets, and follows) and their demographic information using an automated cluster analysis. After revealing characteristics of each segment, the findings highlight both sport focused (e.g., hockey, basketball) and non-sport focused (e.g...Read more