Consumers' attitudes and behaviours toward the sponsors of a football club.

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate whether people’s attitudes and behaviours toward certain types of commercial brands change when these, become a sponsoring partner of a well-known international football club. Specifically, this thesis uses the context of the football industry to examine whether sponsoring a football team has any effect on individuals’ attitudes toward the sponsors and purchase intentions of commercial brands. A full-factorial design experiment is the approach chosen for this research. The research will employ an experiment 4x2 between subjects, full factorial design to test what effect different sponsors’ brands such as functional, innovative, high and low involvement with and/or without an associated to a football club have on individuals’ attitudes, behaviours and purchase intentions toward the commercial brands. Further, in the experiment participants were exposed to one of the eight possible conditions, which were presented as modified print advertisements. A total of 240 responses were collected through online convenience sampling on social platforms including Facebook, Pollpool and SurveyCircle. Factorial ANCOVA and linear regression analyses were conducted to test the hypothesised effects. The results indicated that the type of sponsor does not affect attitude toward the sponsor and purchase intentions. It is also showed that attachment to a club has a significant effect on attitude toward the sponsor. Moreover, being associated with a football club affects the consumers’ purchase intentions. Both theoretically and practical implications of these findings, alongside directions for future research, are discussed.