Marc Mazodier

Unmasking the ambushers: conceptual framework and empirical evidence

Purpose: Sport events organizers have recently undertaken to disclose to the general public instances where firms have conspired to ambush the official sponsors. In doing so, they have sought to sensitise audiences to sponsors’ valuable contribution. However, what is the effect of such disclosure on ambush marketers’ brands? This study aims to answer this question, using an experimental approach. Design: We conducted two successive experiments. Our first study used a student sample (N=120) and a fictitious brand. Our second study used a before-and-after experiment with control groups (N=480), using four real brands and print disclosure articles. Data was collected from 6 French metropolitan areas and analysed using Repeated Measure ANOVA and MANOVA. Results: Ambush marketing disclosure is associated with lower attitudes towards the ambusher’s brand. Two variables moderate this effect: involvement in the event and attitude towards sponsorship, both of which worsen the negative influence of ambush disclosure on audiences’ attitudes. Research Limitations/Implications: While the empirical work reflects one national context and one specific sport event, our findings are the first to empirically support the notion that disclosure of ambush practices adversely impacts ambushers’ brand. Practical Implications: Our results offer official sponsors and event organisers an effective alternative strategy to legal protection, with demonstrated effects on the core target audience of the event. Originality/Value: The literature has alluded to possible perverse effects of ambush marketing. This study is the first to draw an analogy with corrective advertising to test and demonstrate the impact of ambush disclosure on ambushers’ brands.

The roles of consumer ethnocentrism, animosity, and cosmopolitanism in sponsorship effects

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the impacts of consumer ethnocentrism, animosity and cosmopolitanism on the effects of sponsorships on brand affect and brand trust, using latent growth modelling (LGM) to disentangle the static and dynamic components of brand affect and brand trust. Design/methodology/approach – An online panel of UK participants reported their perceptions of a French sponsor at three successive points (before, during and at the end of the 2012 London Olympics). Of the 903 respondents at T1, 694 remained at T2 (76.8 per cent) and 577 (63.9 per cent) remained at T3. Another 302 respondents only at T3 controlled for potential mere measurement effects. The data were analysed using LGM techniques. Findings – Due to sponsorship effects, brand affect and brand trust increased linearly over time. However, consumer ethnocentrism and animosity negatively moderated these increases. Cosmopolitanism enhanced brand affect but not brand trust. Research limitations/implications – As market globalisa...

Which sport sponsorships most impact sponsor CSR image

Purpose This study aims to investigate how organizations can utilize sport sponsorship to build their corporate social responsibility (CSR) image effectively, by examining the attributes of a sports property that are most conducive to a sponsor gaining CSR image benefits. Design/methodology/approach A between-subjects experimental design was used, which simulated different sponsorship scenarios by varying community proximity (operationalized by property scope) and property engagement in community initiatives. Hypotheses were tested with a non-parametric bootstrapping-based procedure, using a panel sample of 400. Findings The results show that a sporting property’s proactive community engagement is conducive to an enhanced CSR image for its sponsor, especially when the property operates on the national rather than grassroots level. Further analysis also demonstrates the critical contribution of altruistic motive attributions in the process. Originality/value This study advances knowledge on how organizations may build their CSR image while leveraging on the strong audience involvement and the mass appeal of sport sponsorship. It is the first to offer insights into the extent to which a sports property’s proactive engagement in the community, rather than that of the sponsoring firm itself, enhances the CSR image of the sponsor, particularly if the property’s community proximity is low. Furthermore, our results provide an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms determining the benefits that sponsors can reap from a property’s activities.

The Hidden Factors Behind Sponsorship and Image Transfer: Considerations for Bilateral Image Transfer among Sponsors and Events

Sponsorship is a major marketing communication tool, with global spending estimated to exceed

Making Warnings About Misleading Advertising and Product Recalls More Effective: An Implicit Attitude Perspective

60.2 billion (USD) in 2016, nearly double the

The Role of Team-Sponsor Logo Color Congruity in Sponsorship Effectiveness: An Abstract

37.7 billion spent in 2006 (IEG, [2007][1], [2016][2]). By paying for the opportunity to be associated with a given event, marketers hope that the events

How Minority Status and Fan Commitment Affect Sponsorship Evaluation: An Abstract

The authors tested whether image-based information is more effective than text in changing implicit attitudes from positive to negative, even when both forms similarly change explicit attitudes. They studied corrective information (i.e., warnings about misleading advertising and product recall notices) because it is a common, important effort to change consumer attitudes. Corrective information in the form of pictures or imagery-evoking text, as well as direct instructions to imagine the scene, changed implicit attitudes more than plain, descriptive text, which is currently the most common warning method. Image-based stimuli can change implicit attitudes because they evoke vivid visual mental imagery of counterattitudinal valence (Experiments 1–2). Conditions that hindered the formation of visual mental imagery blocked implicit attitude change, whereas cognitive busyness did not (Experiment 3). In short, imagery-based information changed both explicit and implicit attitudes, whereas materials not based on imagery changed only explicit attitudes. Managers and regulators who aim to protect consumers from claims and products that could do harm should use image-based campaigns to best convey the message effectively.

Advertisement Typicality: A Longitudinal Experiment: Can Sponsors Transfer the Image Of a Sporting Event to Their Brand?

Sports remains one of the few avenues for brands to reach mass market consumers in the context of a fragmented, on-demand, and commercial-free (e.g., Netflix) modern entertainment landscape. Accordingly, branding expenditures on sponsorship are growing faster than traditional advertising as brands seek to gain sports fans’ favor through visual signs of support for fans’ teams. The authors investigate the visual design element of color in sponsorship images. Study 1 matches 703 Major League Baseball fans’ evaluations of their team’s sponsors to observable characteristics of in-stadium sponsorship signage, which provides correlational evidence that fans evaluate a sponsor more positively when its colors coincidentally match the team. Furthermore, a brand without an inherent match to a team’s colors can enjoy even greater sponsorship efficacy by adopting the team’s colors. The peripheral cue from color congruence facilitates affect transfer, and created congruence—adopting the team’s colors—provides a further boost through fan appraisals of sponsor’s support. Study 2 offers experimental evidence from 200 fans who sampled a sports drink with brand team cobranding on the label in the brand logo’s original colors or the team’s colors. In the condition where the brand’s sincerity of support was uncertain, color change improved fans’ evaluation of the sponsorship, and perceived sincerity of support mediated the positive impact of created color congruence. While prior studies have shown that sponsorship fails to deliver positive returns (Mazodier & Rezaee, 2013) or works poorly in a lab experiment based on eye tracking when sponsor’s signage color matches the colors of the sport (Breuer & Rumpf, 2015), the current studies offer complementary real-world evidence that sponsor brands can enjoy greater sponsorship success without adding much cost by simply selecting teams to sponsor where they share colors or by adopting the team’s colors.

The Question of Sponsorship Effectiveness

Brands seeking to build a strong relationship with their target customers sometimes support social causes supported by their target customers in an effort to facilitate bonding through perceived similarity (Cornwell 2015). Although building relationships with customers through shared interests is well understood in the context of direct one-to-one relationships marketing (Palmatier et al. 2006), the processes are more complex and less understood when the target customer exists as a group with a social identity. Such a context includes brand sponsorship of sports teams in which fans are the target customers and group processes inform individual fan’s response to the sponsorship (e.g., social identity of the group, see Madrigal 2001). To further our understanding of how group processes shape individual’s reactions to sponsorship strategies, the current research examines how the context of the fan relative to others in their community (majority or minority status of the fan in their community) alters their acceptance of the brand as a common supporter of their team. We show that just as a person is more likely to warmly embrace a fellow countryman when they encounter each other in a foreign land rather than in their homeland, brands are more likely to gain acceptance when supporters of the team are isolated from other fans. Building on Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, we also show that the relevance of the fan’s status among their community (isolated minority status or majority status) is greater the more commitment they feel to the team.

Achieving Brand Loyalty Through Sponsorship: The Role of Fit and Self-Congruity

ABSTRACT This study examines how advertisement typicality influences the capacity of sponsorship to transfer an image from a sporting event to a brand over time. Two pretests and one main experiment, involving more than 2,200 respondents in total, revealed that high advertisement typicality enhanced the effectiveness of sponsorship in event-related advertising more than low typicality. This study also introduces a robust and effective method to assess the typicality of various combinations of event-related elements: discrete-choice experiments. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for marketing and brand managers.