“I Know What You Did Last Night!”: The Impact of Digital Communications for Sport Celebrity Transgressions

Sassenberg, Anne-Marie; Summers, Jane; Hassan, Rumman

doi:10.15444/gmc2016.11.01.05

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…A total of 19 undergraduate students at a large Southeastern university in the U.S. participated in the interviews. The sample size for the focus group interviews is deemed appropriate as at least six participants should be recruited for each session (Sassenberg, 2015). Participants were asked to freely discuss with other focus-group participants about what kinds of perceptions, knowledge, images and beliefs they had about athletes whom they had known of.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Assumption Check For Consumer Dissonancementioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of pre-scandal associations of athlete endorsers and scandal types on consumer blame and eWOM

Sato

Kim

et al. 2023

IJSMS

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PurposeThe purpose of this research is to examine how pre-scandal associations and scandal types interactively influence consumer judgment and negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).Design/methodology/approachDrawing from cognitive dissonance theory and associative memory network model, the online experiments (Amazon Mechanical Turk; Nexperiment 1 = 146 and Nexperiment 2 = 189) were conducted to examine the effects of positive pre-scandal associations (performance vs pro-social) and scandal types (performance-related vs -unrelated) on consumer blame and eWOM toward scandalized athletes. Data were analyzed by employing t-test (experiment 1), Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) and PROCESS Model 8 (experiment 2) to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe findings highlight that positive pre-scandal association demonstrated both protecting and backfiring effects depending on the types of scandals. Specifically, when performance-related scandals emerged, consumers made more negative blame judgment of athletes with salient performance association, relative to pro-social association. Inversely, when performance-unrelated scandals occurred, athletes with salient pro-social association were more likely to be blamed. Regarding eWOM, consumers generate more negative eWOM when athletes with pre-performance associations are involved with performance-related scandals. This pattern of the result was not observed when athletes' pro-social association and performance-unrelated scandals were prominent.Originality/valueThe current work adds consumers' negative eWOM toward scandalized athletes to the literature as a predictor of how athletes' pre-scandal association with consumers and scandal types are related. The findings indicate that consumers feel greater dissonance and generate more negative eWOM when athletes' pre-scandal associations and scandal types are closely related.

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Section: Experiments 1: Assumption Check For Consumer Dissonancementioning

confidence: 99%