Leveraging spectator emotion: A review and conceptual framework for marketing health behaviors in elite sports

Abstract

Elite sport provides an exciting and dynamic emotional experience for spectators. Social marketers using sport sponsorship to promote health messages are yet to consider the impact of the temporal emotional sporting context in which health messages are promoted. The authors provide a critical review of the evidence for the influence of emotion on behavior and seek to elucidate the implications for health sponsorship in sport. Articles were identified via electronic database searches and returned-article references, with thirty-three suitable articles included. Drawing on evidence from sport sponsorship, social marketing, advertising, and cause-related marketing, the review highlights few studies have investigated emotion, health communication, and behavior in a sport sponsorship context. The findings indicate that positive (e.g. happiness, compassion) and negative (e.g. fear, guilt) emotions influence intentions and behaviors with the interaction of message framing important when delivering social marketing messages. A conceptual model presents how emotions may influence behavioral health sponsorship outcomes and provides areas of future research to develop best policy and practice when delivering health sponsorship in a sporting context.