Articles in this issue:

• The Impact of Authenticity on Celebrity Athlete Social Media Endorsement Messaging

  Eric Nichols and Stephen Shapiro

  The rise in celebrity athletes’ influence due to social media has had a massive effect on endorsement opportunities. Social media has given celebrity athletes an owned platform from which to leverage their audience into business opportunities, but an understanding of how authenticity affects the consumer was needed. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine how the perceived authenticity of celebrity athletes’ social media endorsement posts affects brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Two experiments were conducted using fictitious Twitter posts including celebrity athletes...Read more

• Who Says She’s Not a True Fan? Perceptions of Fan Authenticity Among Gen Z Women Sports Fans

  Christina S. Simmers

  Rebecca Rast

  and Joshua T. Coleman

  While sports have traditionally been perceived as an industry dominated by men, the women’s sports fashion industry is growing both in terms of market power and complexity. This paper explores women’s fanwear fashion choices and others’ perceptions of their fan authenticity among Gen Z sports fans. Through an application of attribution theory, empirical analyses revealed that men generally do not make differential attributions toward a woman’s fan authenticity based on her fashion choice. Women, however, attribute a nuanced variety of motive and authenticity based on fanwear choice. These...Read more

• They Saw a Game! Impact of Consumers’ Self-Serving Bias on Moral Disengagement and Subsequent Tolerant Responses Toward Athlete Scandals

  Jin Woo Ahn

  Joon Sung Lee

  and Daniel L. Wann

  This research attempted to examine the tolerant responses of sport fans to scandalized athletes by drawing on fans’ self-serving bias and attribution theory. To this end, we conducted a quasi-experimental study (n = 219).The results of SEM analysis indicate that fans with a high team identification reported a greater level of external attribution than those with low team identification, while fans with low team identification reported a greater level of internal attribution than those with high team identification. Also, external attribution had positive impacts on moral disengagement,...Read more

• Dehumanization of Professional Athletes and Implications for Brand Attachment

  Ben Larkin

  Brendan Dwyer

  and Chad Goebert

  A growing amount of attention has been paid to the topic of dehumanization of professional athletes in recent years, both in mainstream media and in academic literature. Even professional athletes themselves have begun speaking out on the issue. Nevertheless, the academic scholarship on this phenomenon remains sparse, with scholars yet to provide empirical evidence that sport fans do, in fact, dehumanize professional athletes. The current research fills this void by exploring fans’ implicit tendencies to view professional athletes as both machines and animals, with a particular emphasis on...Read more

• Improving the Generalizability of the Effects of Sport Sponsorship on Brand Awareness: A Longitudinal, Multilevel Perspective

  Jonathan A. Jensen and Jeremy Vlacancich

  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

• Consolidation of Concepts and Scales Examining External Activation Factors Affecting Sport Consumption

  Galen T. Trail

  Priscila Alfaro-Barrantes

  and Yukyoum Kim

  Throughout the sport management literature, a plethora of scales exist that measure constructs that impact sport consumption. Although the scales have different names and may be derived from different theories, many of them use the same items. We propose to consolidate those scales in order to create one unified scale. Specifically, the purpose of this paper was to determine whether Keller’s (1993) brand association framework (product attributes, non-product attributes, and product benefits) could consolidate the existing models and theories that purport to measure what impacts people to...Read more