Corporate sponsorship of events contributes significantly to marketing aims, including brand awareness as measured by recall and recognition of sponsor‐event pairings. Unfortunately, resultant advantages accrue disproportionately to brands having a natural or congruent fit with the available sponsorship properties. In three cued‐recall experiments, the effect of articulation of sponsorship fit on memory for sponsor‐event pairings is examined. While congruent sponsors have a natural memory advantage, results demonstrate that memory improvements via articulation are possible for incongruent sponsor‐event pairings. These improvements are, however, affected by the presence of competitor brands and the way in which memory is accessed.

Sponsorship-linked marketing: The role of articulation in memory

Esports, or competitive video gaming competitions, bring together aspects of sports, business, leisure, technology, and digital media, appealing to academics across multiple disciplines. Yet, esports scholarship remains highly fragmented, with scholars operating within traditional academic silos and forgoing opportunities to build on esports’ interdisciplinary nature. The purpose of this integrative review is to synthesize esports scholarship from across disciplines, identify critical scholarly issues, and develop a pragmatic, interdisciplinary research agenda. We find that extant esports scholarship is categorized by literature seeking to conceptualize and legitimize esports via sport parallels, with a focus on the consumers and culture of esports. Scholarly issues include researchers examining esports in their respective academic silos, omitting opportunities to connect conceptually similar streams of literature. Overall, we synthesize esports scholarship, bridge chasms between disjointed streams of literature, and outline a pragmatic research agenda which could benefit from interdisciplinary inquiries based on a shared understanding of esports.

Esports Scholarship Review: Synthesis, Contributions, and Future Research

The strategic advantage of mature-stage firms: Digitalization and the diversification of professional sport into esports

Corporate growth strategies in an era of digitalization: A network analysis of the national basketball association’s 2K league sponsors

Digital innovations provide mature organizations with opportunities to grow beyond their core industry and thereby compete with formerly tangentially related firms. In this research, we examine how mature organizations generate a competitive advantage when diversifying beyond their native industry. We address this question, withing the context of mature professional sport organizations that are affiliating with esports – organized video game competitions. Esports exemplify the growing number of digital innovations influencing the way organizations operate. Our study adds to existing knowledge by demonstrating how resources initially developed to compete with intra-industry organizations may transform into sources of competitive advantage when entering inter-industry competition. Drawing on strategic management perspectives based on the resource-based view (RBV) and knowledge-based view (KBV), we found that the experience-based tacit knowledge embedded in a firm (and its human capital) generates competitive advantage in these new industries. However, this knowledge is only as valuable as the versatility of the resources guiding its use. Our findings indicate that a firm’s versatile resources, when coupled with its knowledge, are the basis for generating a competitive advantage. Thus, as mature organizations diversify, they stand to benefit from identifying the versatile resources developed in their native competitive environment that represent strategic resources when challenging new competitors and using said resources in tandem with their knowledge-based competencies. 

Traditional sport organizations and their sponsors are beginning to embrace esports, but the effectiveness of non-endemic sponsorships in esports remains uncertain. Esports consumers are notoriousl...

Esports sponsorship : an empirical examination of esports consumers’ perceptions of non-endemic sponsors

Swisscom Asport ("Asport") has set itself the target of covering the entire video process from production to distribution. Its services should be affordable not only for professional sports clubs but also for their amateur counterparts. Despite limited resources, clubs want to increase their attractiveness through new technologies and meet members' needs. This paper examines the factors that lead to the acceptance of Asport services by sports clubs. In addition, the willingness to pay for these services is evaluated. Pricing is critical to success in innovation and also because of the limited financial resources of sports clubs. Based on the literature research, a conceptual model was developed based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model (UTAUT), tested using an online survey of Swiss amateur football clubs, and evaluated using regression analysis. The study findings show that social environment exerts the strongest influence on behavioral intention, defined as "acceptance" in this paper. Furthermore, the two independent variables, performance expectancy and effort expectancy, have a significant effect on user acceptance. In contrast to the original model (UTAUT), this paper demonstrates the direct influence of attitude to use. Of the independent variables, facilitating conditions have an additional effect on attitude to use. The results demonstrate that it is not acceptance but attitude to use that influences willingness to pay. An in-depth evaluation of willingness to pay shows that the optimal price point is 83.3% lower than the price offered by the company; however, there are budget-dependent variations in the assessment.

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Marcel Huettermann

Papers

Esports sponsorship : an empirical examination of esports consumers’ perceptions of non-endemic sponsors

Video Production and Distribution Platform in Swiss Sports Teams: An Analysis of Acceptance and Willingness to Pay.