Abstract

Sports sponsorship and ambush marketing are the two critical major issues involved in corporate sports marketing. From the perspectives of corporations that are interested in sports marketing, the former is a positive tool for corporate communication, and meanwhile the latter is a negative or neutral tool. Both of the strategies are interrelated. It would be interesting to explore how sports consumers perceive the two conflicting or inter-related marketing strategies. The objectives of this study are to explore the characteristics Korean sports consumers in terms of their orientation toward a sporting event (OSE, Pons, Mourail and Nyeck 2006) and test the relationships between the OSE and their attitudes toward sports sponsorship and ambush marketing. Data were collected from 800 Korean consumers in Seoul over a 3-week period employing a purposive quota sampling (by age and gender) with an interview method. The questionnaire consisted of the OSE scale (Pons, Mourali, and Nyeck(2006), overall attitude toward sports sponsorship, ambush marketing, and attitude toward on specific types of sports sponsorship. The OSE scale was originally constructed to understand orientation toward sports events and is composed of three dimensions (socialization;s, sensation seeking;ss, and cognition seeking;cs). However, considering cultural differences between Korea and U.S, we modified and adapted the scale to the Korean context and operationalized using seven-point Likert scales. Attitude toward sports sponsorship was assessed with four items using seven-point Likert scales. Attitude toward ambush marketing was measured using the items used by Shani and Sandler(1998) with modification, respectively. Sports sponsorship can have many facets according to levels of beneficiaries. The current study categorized sports sponsorship into four levels (i.e., athletes, teams, leagues, and competition). The OSE scales and other measures are considered reliable in general except socialization (α=.62) and cognition seeking (α=.63) based on α coefficients (attitude toward sponsorship=.73, attitude toward ambush marketing=.71, OSE=.84). The OSE and its three dimensions were split by median scores to classify consumers into high and low groups. The results of data analyses show that high OSE group has a more favorable attitude toward sports sponsorship than the low OSE group (Mhi=5.02, Mlo=4.69, t=6.81, p .05). The implications of findings are interpreted and discussed in terms of corporate marketing communication.

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