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14 (Teori Brand Image)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1464-6668.htm
International
Exploring the impact of athlete Journal of Sports
Marketing and
brand image on fans’ behavioural Sponsorship
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to explore the impact of athlete brand image on fans’ social media engagement,
purchase intentions, and also examines the mediating role of emotional attachment on these relationships, as
well as the moderating role of perceived price value between emotional attachment and purchase intentions.
Design/methodology/approach – The data are based on an online survey conducted in China (N 5 572).
The PLS-SEM (partial least squares structural equation model) and regression-based estimation method
(PROCESS) are employed to test the hypotheses.
Findings – The results indicate a positive relationship between athletes’ athletic performance and fans’ social
media engagement as well as purchase intentions. The impact of athletes’ attractive appearance and
marketable lifestyle on fans’ purchase intentions is sequentially mediated by emotional attachment and social
media engagement. Moreover, the mediation effect of athletes’ off-field image and purchase intentions is
contingent upon fans’ perceived price value.
Research limitations/implications – Athletes and marketers could integrate and leverage both the on-field
and off-field attributes to cultivate emotional connections with fans. Sports organizations and managers need
to pay attention to fans’ social media engagement and provide content that increases engagement and converts
into transactional behavioural intentions.
Originality/value – The study provides empirical evidence of the mediating role of emotional attachment
between athlete brand image and fans’ purchase intentions. The explanatory mechanisms involving emotional
attachment and social media engagement (non-transactional behavioural intentions) are anticipated to be a
noteworthy addition to the traditional fan transactional behavioural intentions framework. Moreover, the
research introduces and confirms perceived price value as a crucial moderating factor influencing the
relationship between emotional attachment and purchase intentions.
Keywords Athlete brand image, Emotional attachment, Perceived price value, Social media engagement,
Purchase intentions
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Human brands, including celebrities, due to their potential for professional management and
possession of associations and features akin to traditional brands, are commonly classified as
brands (Arai et al., 2014; Thomson, 2006). Notably, athletes have showcased considerable
commercial and social value in tandem with the commercialization of the sports industry, being
perceived as social symbols and conveyors of cultural significance (Mahmoudian et al., 2021).
International Journal of Sports
Marketing and Sponsorship
The authors thank three anonymous referees for their insightful comments. Thanks also to Bingrui © Emerald Publishing Limited
1464-6668
Huang at Xiamen University for his valuable suggestions. DOI 10.1108/IJSMS-01-2024-0030
IJSMS Numerous professional athletes who have attained celebrity status among fans, such as LeBron
James and Roger Federer, are also recognized as human brands (Carlson and Donavan, 2013).
Corporate brand strategies, exemplified by companies like Nike, leverage numerous elite
athletes to infuse the distinctive attributes of their respective sports into the endorsement
process (McCormick, 2018). However, human brands face challenges because humans are more
fragile and unpredictable than product brands due to their nature of instability, complexity, and
lack of control. They must balance their personal and professional lives, enduring continual
public scrutiny (Chang, 2018). Therefore, considering athlete brands solely as an offshoot of
celebrity endorsements would be imprudent, further research is essential to comprehend the
unique attributes of human brands (Osorio et al., 2020). Athlete branding’s emergence as a
potential marketing practice has become the focus of corporations and a topic of academic
inquiry. Despite the common understanding of athletes as brands, research on how using
athletes as brands affect consumer behaviour still requires further development to understand
fan reactions to athletes better (Kunkel et al., 2019).
Initial researchers focused on conceptualizing athlete brand image (Arai et al., 2013; Geurin-
Eagleman and Burch, 2016) and there seems to be agreement among researchers that on- and off-
field image are the two key dimensions to properly understand athlete brands (e.g. Parmentier
and Fischer, 2012). Previous studies have suggested that it exerts an influence on the emotional
and behavioural outcomes associated with connected entities, such as the athlete’s team and
sponsors (e.g. Carlson and Donavan, 2013). Recent studies by Hasaan et al. (2018) proposed a
framework centred on athlete on- and off-field images, albeit the model has yet to be empirically
proven. The other studies have examined the fans’ self-brand connection and its impact on the
relationship between athlete brand image and behavioural loyalty from the perspective of
consumers and brand relationships (Kunkel et al., 2019). However, empirical testing is required to
determine the unique influence of athletes’ on- and off-field brand image on fans’ attitudes and
behavioural intentions (Summers and Johnson Morgan, 2008; Kunkel et al., 2019).
In sport contexts, previous literature has focused on the impact of athlete sponsorship on
fans’ behavioural intentions, which are largely transactional in nature around core sport
products (e.g. Biscaia et al., 2013). As fans’ behavioural intentions with an athlete, there are
spillovers that include engagement with the team and online brand communities (Bowden et al.,
2017). Scholars (e.g. Doyle et al., 2022; McDonald et al., 2022) have recently extended the focus of
fan behavioural intentions from transactional (e.g. purchase intentions) to non-transactional
(e.g. volunteering). In parallel, scholars have increasingly recognized the rise of athlete brands
within the sport ecosystem (Su et al., 2020), with social media largely seen as the most essential
channel for athletes to establish and promote their brands. Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016)
demonstrated that sport consumers actively engage with sport objects and each other across
social media. Therefore, we attempt to incorporate non-transactional behavioural intentions (i.e.
social media engagement) into a traditional framework of fan transactional intentions to
examine the impact of athletes’ brand image on fans’ behavioural outcomes.
Sport, allows consumers to “engage” with multiple “points of attachment” that act as anchor
points to a sport entity. These foci include teams, events, athletes, or other fans (Kwon et al.,
2005). The sport literature has created numerous relevant constructs to understand fans’
attachment to sports teams, including team identification (Kwon et al., 2007) and team
commitment (Kunkel et al., 2019). Although prior research has focused on attachment to sports
teams, the same significance may apply to other sports entities such as athletes (e.g. Carlson
and Donavan, 2013; Hautbois et al., 2024). This is because athletes are among the most
prevalent types of human brands (Thomson, 2006) and have significant levels of social
influence, which has long-term effects on fans. Therefore, research related to building
connections with fans and athletes still deserves further exploration (Hofmann et al., 2021).
Individuals’ attachment experiences influence their thoughts, interactions with others, and their
actions (Hinson et al., 2019). In sport context, positive attitudes have been suggested to mediate
the relationship between athlete on- and off-field attributes and the subsequent behavioural International
intentions (Kunkel et al., 2019). Consequently, emotional attachment may play a mediating role Journal of Sports
in the relationship between athlete brand image and fan behavioural outcomes. Marketing and
At the same time, perceived price value has gotten a lot of attention in the sport marketing Sponsorship
literature as a key variable in explaining consumer behaviour (e.g. Chi and Kilduff, 2011; Kwon
et al., 2007). As athlete brands confer certain symbolic significance, there may be individual
differences in how consumers perceive them and how they affect fan behavioural intentions
concerning athlete brand image (Summers and Johnson Morgan, 2008). Previous studies have
demonstrated that perceived price value showed the most influential impact on the overall
consumer perceived value of sport products (Chi and Kilduff, 2011) and there has been a lack of
scholarly effort in assessing the moderating effect of perceived price value between the
relationships on athlete brand image, emotional attachment and purchase intentions among fans.
Therefore, perceived price value should be taken into account in order to advance the knowledge
of the antecedents to fans’ purchase intentions regarding athlete brand-related products.
Against this background, the purpose of this research was threefold. First, this research links
theories about the development of human brands (Thomson, 2006) with Arai et al. (2013)
conceptualization of athlete brand image, providing the individual level of fans’ emotional
attachment to athletes’ images insights, into which on- and off-field attributes influence fans’
behavioural intentions and examine whether these relationships were mediated by fans’
emotional attachment to the athletes. Second, we not only view fans as targeted objects for
transactional intentions but also emphasize the significance of their non-transactional
behavioural intentions (i.e. social media engagement) and their implications for purchase
likelihood. This enriches previous research, which has unilaterally focused on the impact of
athlete brand image on fans’ transactional or non-transactional behavioural intentions, and
confirms the sequential mediating role of emotional attachment and social media engagement in
the relationship between athlete brand image and purchase intentions. Third, we explore further
the perceived price value as a boundary condition regarding the effect of athlete brand image,
which demonstrates the critical role of fans’ perceived price value in sports marketing. This
study contributes to sports marketing research and practice, providing insights for athletes as
human brands, as well as organizations and marketers on how to manage athlete brands.
Figure 1.
Hypothesized model
3. Method International
3.1 Procedure and sample Journal of Sports
Due to Hasaan et al.’s (2018) suggestion that research on athlete branding may need to be Marketing and
tailored to specific sporting contexts, we focused on basketball players because China has seen Sponsorship
basketball become the most popular team sport in the country (Sun et al., 2021), as well as the
National Basketball Association (NBA) has achieved remarkable success in the Chinese market
(Zhou et al., 2017). Correspondently, a highly competitive basketball shoe market has emerged.
We selected a total of 10 athletes with personally branded signature basketball shoes based on
indicators provided by ESPN (e.g. individual accolades, team accomplishments, on-court
performance impact, etc.) and then included those names in the questionnaire. Of these, LeBron
James and Kevin Durant were chosen by 20.5 and 16.7% of participants, respectively, with
Kyrie Irving (12.2%), Stephen Curry (10.4%), James Harden (9.8%) and Klay Thompson (8.3%)
following. Other athletes with percentages included Damian Lillard (8.1%), Kawhi Leonard
(7.3%), Paul George (4.6%) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (2.1%).
The online questionnaire was distributed through the national online data collection service
Sojump in China, providing a broad and substantial nationwide sample. After explaining the
concept and purpose of the study to the participants, they were asked to choose one athlete from
the list who was most familiar to them and answer the following questions: “Have you ever
watched your favorite player play on TV or live?” and “Do you follow your favorite player on
social media channels?” Then, they were asked to answer questions about that athlete. To check
the quality of the questionnaire, Malhotra (2008) notes that the largest primary effect was found
among respondents who completed the questionnaire in less than 2.6 min. Therefore, responses
were omitted if participants completed the questionnaire in less than two minutes, chose the
same answer for each question, or failed the attention check for “How many NBA
championships has Kobe Bryant won? (Please choose 5 for this item)”. We had 572
participants for data analysis. Among the participants, 69.5% were male and 30.5% were
female, distributed across the following age groups: under 18 years (3.0%), 18–25 years (44.8%),
26–30 years (29.6%), 31–40 years (19.4%), and 41 and above (3.2%). This aligns with the fact
that the younger generation is often seen as the primary consumer of sports products and is
commonly utilized in brand research (Arai et al., 2013).
3.2 Measures
All measurements were adapted from the literature, and translation and back-translation
methods were used to accomplish cross-cultural adaptation of those measurements from English
to Chinese (Brislin, 1980). The instrument for measuring athlete brand image was adapted from
Arai et al. (2013). Emotional attachment was assessed with four items adapted from Sanchez-
Fernandez and Jimenez-Castillo (2021). Perceived price value was assessed using four items
adapted from Sweeney and Soutar (2001). Following Hinson et al. (2019), four items were
employed to assess respondents’ social media engagement. Purchase intention was assessed
using a four-item scale developed by Dodds et al. (1991) and Sanchez-Fernandez and Jimenez-
Castillo (2021). A Likert-type scale, anchored by 1 5 “strongly disagree” and 7 5 “strongly agree”,
was employed to gauge the respondents’ agreement with the questionnaire items, along with the
collection of demographic information (Refer to Table 1 for the scales of the main variables).
4. Results
4.1 Measurement model
We utilized Smart PLS 3.0 and followed Anderson and Gerbing’s (1988) two-step approach to
assessing the measurement and structural models. The first step is an evaluation of the
measurement model, ensuring reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity.
IJSMS Factor Cronbach’s
Constructs Items loading CR AVE alpha
Figure 2.
Partial least squares
(PLS) path model
there is a theoretically justifiable higher-order factor. In this study, the use of second-order
constructs was strongly based on the athlete brand image scale proposed by Arai et al. (2013).
This is corroborated by Pedragosa et al. (2023), who also emphasize the importance of second-
order constructs to ensure parsimonious and interpretable models. In accordance with
measurement theory and consumer behaviour research, we employed the second-order
construct of on-field and off-field images to test structural relationships.
Discriminant validity was confirmed by comparing the square root of the AVE with the
correlation among latent variables. The square roots of the AVE for each construct exceeded
the correlation coefficients, affirming discriminant validity. Details of the square roots of
AVE values and correlation coefficients for the constructs are presented in Table 3.
To address common method bias, we performed Harmon’s one-factor test. The results
indicated that the newly introduced single factor explained 26.50% of the variance, which fell
below the 50% threshold commonly employed to identify the presence of common method
variance (McFarlin and Sweeney, 1992). We further tested common method bias based on the
unmeasured latent method construct technique (Liang et al., 2007). The results showed that
the average variance was 0.037 for the indicators, whereas the method-based average
variance was 0.001. The ratio of the substantive variance to the method variance was around
36:1 (see Appendix for details about common method bias analysis). Consequently, we deem
common method bias to be unlikely to pose a significant issue in this study.
Athletic performance
1. Athletic expertise 1
2. Competition style 0.369** 1
3. Sportsmanship 0.333** 0.331** 1
4. Rivalry 0.359** 0.388** 0.413** 1
Attractive appearance
5. Physical attractiveness 0.058 0.061 0.008 0.020 1
6. Symbol 0.014 0.065 0.028 0.020 0.450** 1
7. Body fitness 0.015 0.076 0.053 0.010 0.333** 0.403** 1
Marketable lifestyle
8. Life story 0.002 0.076 0.071 0.043 0.208** 0.210** 0.227** 1
9. Role model 0.040 0.023 0.046 0.038 0.212** 0.233** 0.287** 0.363** 1
10. Relationship effort 0.030 0.038 0.033 0.010 0.215** 0.252** 0.231** 0.338** 0.350** 1
Note(s): N 5 572; **p < 0.01(two-tailed)
International
Marketing and
Sponsorship
Journal of Sports
Table 2.
The correlation of first-
order constructs
IJSMS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
performance (β 5 0.08, p < 0.05), attractive appearance (β 5 0.07, p < 0.05) and marketable
lifestyle (β 5 0.14, p < 0.001) significantly influenced fans’ purchase intentions, and athlete’s
athletic performance (β 5 0.17, p < 0.001), attractive appearance (β 5 0.30, p < 0.001) and
marketable lifestyle (β 5 0.20, p < 0.001) positively related to social media engagement,
supporting H1 and H2.
H3 tests whether the fans’ emotional attachment mediates the effect of the athlete’s brand
image on purchase intentions. The results showed that the attractive appearance (β 5 0.19,
p < 0.05) and marketable lifestyle (β 5 0.20, p < 0.001) affect fans’ emotional attachment, while
athlete’s athletic performance was not significantly related to emotional attachment
(β 5 0.10, p 5 0.15). Emotional attachment was positively related to the fans’ purchase
intentions (β 5 0.13, p < 0.001). Specifically, emotional attachment had a mediating effect on
an athlete’s attractive appearance (β 5 0.03, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.014, 0.059]) and marketable
lifestyle (β 5 0.03, p < 0.05, 95% CI [0.016, 0.056]) on purchase intentions. Therefore, H3 was
partially supported.
H4 tests whether emotional attachment mediates the effect of the athlete’s brand image on
social media engagement. Emotional attachment was positively related to social media
engagement (β 5 0.37, p < 0.001). Table 4 shows that the indirect effect of emotional
attachment between an athlete’s attractive appearance (β 5 0.07, 95% CI [0.033, 0.114]),
marketable lifestyle (β 5 0.07, 95% CI [0.039, 0.112]) and fans’ social media engagement
respectively, was significant, partially supporting H4.
H5 refers to whether emotional attachment and social media engagement serially mediate
the effect of athlete brand image on fans’ purchase intentions. The result shows that the serial
mediation effects of emotional attachment and social media engagement on the relationship
5. Discussion
The present study aims to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how fans’ perceptions of
an athlete’s brand images influence their social media engagement and purchase intentions to
support that athlete, as well as the boundary conditions that affect purchase intentions.
Overall, key findings can be derived from our results.
Figure 3.
The moderating role of
perceived price value
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Corresponding author
Longzhao Zheng can be contacted at: [email protected]
Appendix International
Journal of Sports
Marketing and
Substantive factor loading (R1) R12 Method factor loading (R2) R22 Sponsorship
AE1 0.118 0.014 0.025 0.001
AE2 0.133 0.018 0.006 0.000
AE3 0.126 0.016 0.031 0.001
CS1 0.127 0.016 0.016 0.000
CS2 0.133 0.018 0.019 0.000
CS3 0.135 0.018 0.035 0.001
SP1 0.129 0.017 0.022 0.000
SP2 0.126 0.016 0.029 0.001
SP3 0.132 0.017 0.006 0.000
RI1 0.131 0.017 0.039 0.002
RI2 0.135 0.018 0.014 0.000
RI3 0.113 0.013 0.028 0.001
PA1 0.149 0.022 0.028 0.001
PA2 0.166 0.028 0.026 0.001
PA3 0.154 0.024 0.001 0.000
SY1 0.177 0.031 0.007 0.000
SY2 0.188 0.035 0.05 0.003
SY3 0.168 0.028 0.044 0.002
BF1 0.159 0.025 0.075 0.006
BF2 0.132 0.017 0.075 0.006
BF3 0.142 0.020 0.002 0.000
LS1 0.042 0.002 0.001 0.000
LS2 0.041 0.002 0.016 0.000
LS3 0.042 0.002 0.017 0.000
RM1 0.039 0.002 0.011 0.000
RM2 0.04 0.002 0.002 0.000
RM3 0.04 0.002 0.009 0.000
RE1 0.039 0.002 0.005 0.000
RE2 0.039 0.002 0.005 0.000
RE3 0.04 0.002 0.001 0.000
EA1 0.286 0.082 0.052 0.003
EA2 0.284 0.081 0.027 0.001
EA3 0.294 0.086 0.014 0.000
EA4 0.283 0.080 0.04 0.002
PPV1 0.278 0.077 0.033 0.001
PPV2 0.273 0.075 0.025 0.001
PPV3 0.273 0.075 0.02 0.000
PPV4 0.271 0.073 0.011 0.000
SME1 0.281 0.079 0.07 0.005
SME2 0.274 0.075 0.036 0.001
SME3 0.281 0.079 0.018 0.000
SME4 0.278 0.077 0.053 0.003
PI1 0.281 0.079 0.01 0.000
PI2 0.276 0.076 0.054 0.003
PI3 0.286 0.082 0.05 0.003
PI4 0.285 0.081 0.011 0.000
Average 0.037 0.001
Note(s): AE: athletic expertise; CS: competition style, SP: sportsmanship; RI: rivalry; PA: physical Table A1.
attractiveness, SY: symbol; BF: body fitness; LS: life story; RM: role model; RE: relationship effort; EA: Common method bias
emotional attachment; PPV: perceived price value; SME: social media engagement; PI: purchase intention analysis