Articles in this issue:

  • Khalid Ballouli
    Gregg Bennett

    On the red-eye flight from Ann Arbor to Houston, Noelle found she was the only passenger not sleeping soundly. The electric buzz from the previous day’s studio recording was still rippling through her body. Noelle had spent weeks in Ann Arbor consulting with the University of Michigan regarding a music strategy to help market Wolverine athletics. Last night, she witnessed the culmination of her project, as Michigan rock band Pop Evil recorded a final version of their song titled “Big House,” a tribute to the famed Michigan Stadium. In the studio, Noelle and her colleagues glossed over...Read more

  • Brody J. Ruihley
    T. Christopher Greenwell

    The aim of this paper is to identify service quality attributes of the sport participation experience that may be most influential to sport participants’ satisfaction (satisfiers) and dissatisfaction (dissatisfiers). Further, this study examined how these attributes may be different relative to the activity versus the service provider. Complaints and compliments relative to both the activity and the service provider were solicited and analyzed in order to gain a more thorough knowledge of the recreational customer’s service experience. A total of 1,010 complaints and compliments were...Read more

  • Chiyoung Kim
    Bob Heere

    While consumers within emerging markets are the largest growth market for global sport apparel brands, relatively little is known about how they perceive these brands. These emerging markets have recently become consumer markets for Western brands, yet they initially served as producing nations. This study examined how this transition affected consumer perceptions on global sport apparel brands. Consumer behavior theories, such as the brand as “Western status symbol,” ethnocentrism, the country of origin effect, and the country of manufacturing effect were all incorporated within this...Read more

  • Eric MacIntosh
    John Nadeau
    Benoit Seguin
    Norm O’Reilly
    Cheri L. Bradish
    David Legg

    Sponsorship of mega-sports events continues to be one of the most popular forms of marketing. The international appeal and reach of the Olympic Games, in particular, is amongst the top advertising and sponsorship opportunities in the world for international branding. In turn, the marketing value provided by the Olympic Games has attracted the interest of multiple sponsors in various categories, leading to competitive hosting bids and ambush marketing. This study examined mega-sports event interest as a determinant of sponsorship and ambush marketing attitudes, as well as the purchase...Read more

  • Steve McKelvey
    Dennis Sandler
    Kevin Snyder

    Prior academic research studies have examined the practice of ambush marketing from the perspective of sporting event non-participants (e.g., spectators, viewers and general sport consumers).This exploratory study furthers the line of research into ambush marketing by assessing the attitudes of participants in a major sporting event toward the practice of ambush marketing. Specifically, the researchers surveyed a random sampling of runners who participated in the 2005 and the 2008 ING New York City Marathons. In contrast to the findings in prior studies of sporting event non-participants,...Read more

  • Barbara Osborne
    Paul J. Batista

    Can the local newspaper simply show up at a post-season high school football game, set up a video camera and live stream the entire game on its website … all under the banner of the First Amendment? That was the crux of the issue in a federal court case decided this past summer (WIAA v. Gannett Co., 2011). At stake was the ability of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA), the governing body for middle and high school athletics in the state of Wisconsin, to exclusively sell the video rights to its post-season tournament games.Read more