No More 'Good' Intentions: Purchase Behaviors in Sponsorship

Sponsorship of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games: An Empirical Examination of the Reactions to Local Sponsors and Rival Brands

“…The underlying rationale for this assumption is provided by the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), highlighting that an intention represents an indicator of how much a person is willing to engage in a behavior. While this theoretical assumption has been attested in some previous studies (e.g., Cheng, Chen, Chen, & Lu, 2012), it is also important to note that a purchase intention is not the same as an actual purchase behavior, and that the link between intention and purchase has not always been confirmed in sponsorship studies (e.g., Zaharia et al, 2016). Notwithstanding, behavioral intentions have been used as the final indicator to evaluate sponsorship effectiveness in many studies (e.g., Biscaia et al, 2013;O'Reilly et al, 2008), due to the difficulties in collecting data on actual purchase behaviors and because sponsor-related purchase behaviors may depend on a variety of other aspects that may not be related to the sport event (Crompton, 2014).…”

“…This theoretical assumption has been empirically tested in numerous studies conducted within the sport sponsorship domain. For example, Biscaia et al (2013) noted that attitude towards the sponsor was the strongest predictor of purchase intentions of two sponsors from a professional sport team, while Zaharia, Biscaia, Gray, and Stotlar (2016) have also reported a strong positive relationship between fans' attitudes toward the sponsor and purchase intentions. However, most research using actual sponsors (as opposed to abstract sponsors) is focused on the settings of professional sport where events (i.e., games) are regularly available for consumers, and little is known on the attitude toward specific local sponsors of transient sport mega-events (i.e., not held every year; Nadeau et al, 2016) and how it influences the intention to purchase the associated products.…”

“…As sponsorship in sports continues to grow (IEG, 2017), a comprehensive model of purchase intentions through a longitudinal approach would be of great value for both OCOGs and local sponsors (O'Reilly et al, 2008). In addition, the examination of the link between purchase intentions and actual purchase behaviors would be important to take into account in future studies, given that this is paramount to understanding sponsorship effectiveness in sport mega-events and recent studies have suggested further attention be given to this topic (e.g., Yoshida, Heere, & Gordon, 2015;Zaharia et al, 2016). An additional suggestion for future studies seeking to better understand how local sponsors and host entities could improve the effectiveness of their sponsorship deals might be the comparison of the proposed relationships among local sponsors of different sport mega-events (e.g., FIFA World Cup vs. Olympic Games).…”

Host Country Brand Image and Political Consumerism: The Case of Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup

“…Although the size of the second sample was small, it was larger than those used in previous sport marketing studies with two moments of data collection (i.e., Zaharia et al, 2016). It is noteworthy that, even considering only one country, delimiting the population of FWC consumers may be a very difficult task.…”

“…Recently, some sport marketing studies have advocated for investigations that move beyond intentions to actual behaviors (Shapiro, Ridinger, & Trail, 2013;Zaharia, Biscaia, Gray, & Stotlar, 2016). Their main argument has been that intentions might never become actual consumption.…”