The dilemmas and gains of brands in a mega sport event alliance

The dilemmas and gains of brands in a mega sport event alliance

Destinations are spending increasing amounts of money hosting mega sport events. Host destinations rely on co-branding strategies to positively influence their brand image. This thesis explores the spillover effects occurring between brand partners involved in hosting a mega sport event. In this regard, brand partners are regularly confronted with a range of challenges, such as the high cost of hosting the event, violations of human rights and the countless opportunities for carefully planned alliances to experience unforeseen negative spillover that can impede an event’s sustainable growth or can ultimately result in the failure of an event alliance.

A holistic view of the brands involvement in the hosting of a mega sport event is lacking in the current literature. Brand partners involved in hosting a mega sport event form an alliance where the equity of one brand partner has the potential to spillover to the associated brand partners. Brands involved in hosting a mega sport event have traditionally been considered from a tourism perspective, investigating primarily the effects of the mega sport event on the host destination brand. This thesis argues that the body of knowledge on mega sport events is limited by narrow discussions on the phenomenon of hosting a successful mega sport event.

This thesis reports on research that aims to investigate mega sport event alliances using a holistic approach from consumers perceptive. This study argues that a holistic overview of a mega sport event alliance is not supported by the traditionally accepted theoretical foundations on mega sport events and co-branding strategies. Prior research primarily focuses on mega sport event in how these event impact on the host destination. A broader theoretical basis is thus needed to examine these events. As this thesis demonstrated, building equity requires the brand partners to acknowledge and value the sports brand in the mega sport event alliance.

This thesis contains a research article that investigated the brand alliance of a mega sport event. The empirical research adopted qualitative approach research methodologies using grounded theory and a mixed method was used for the analysis of the data. Through social media mining, the researcher extracted consumer sentiment on social media, Twitter towards the brands involved in staging a mega sport event. The theorical framework of this study is based on consumers knowledge structure in associative network memory theory used by researchers particularly in branding.

The main finding of the thesis is that the sport brand has mainly a positive influence on the associate brand partners, while the event and host destination brands have the ability to negatively influence each other. This was indicated by comments in tweets that refer to the opening and closing ceremonies of the mega sports event. These comments consumers perceived the event and host destination brands as neglecting the sports brand, indicating a negative perception towards the event and host destination brand partners as a result.

These findings are supported by the theorical understanding of the reciprocal spillover effect occurring between brand partners in an alliance (Raufeisen, Wulf, Köcher, Faupel, & Holzmüller, 2019). This research added to the understanding of a mega sport event as a brand alliance by indicating how the spillover effect occurs between brand partners in a mega sport event. The spillover is occurring between all three associated brand partners in the mega sport event alliance. The success of a mega sport event alliance, from tourism and marketing perspective, on the consumer positive perceptions depends on the sports brand partner