Consumption of Food and Non-alcoholic Beverages and the Sports Sponsorship Nexus

Abstract

Sport has been the focus of social scientists and marketing for having worldwide field of cultural, social, political, and economic activities which are unignorable. One of the most interesting study field has been sports sponsorship as one of the key promotional channels intensively applied for marketing different commercial products. Brands of unhealthy food and sugar-sweetened beverages have been shown to heavily invest within sport sponsorships targeting both adults and children across different sporting events the thing that raised policy concerns. We aimed to understand how sports sponsorship exposures could impact the audiences and how two influencing factors; image transfer and implied endorsement, could be sequentially correlated to mediate increased unhealthy food and sweetened non-alcoholic beverage consumptions, brand positive attitudes, and sport sponsor fitness. A total of 105 participants have adequately responded to the on-line questionnaire and findings highlighted the consistent relationship between the sport sponsorship exposures and the triad indicators for unhealthy food / beverage brands, being explicitly to Coca-Cola, PEPSICo, and McDonald’s. Image transfer and implied endorsement could be employed as mediating factors for such relationships with higher mediating effects to the former mediating factor. Our study adds to the knowledge of understanding the nature of the relationship between unhealthy food / beverage sponsoring and football as sport the thing that was in concordance with reported findings as well as being extended to alcohol brands and gambling. Owing to the loopholes within the self-regulated restrictions for the advertising unhealthy food products within both broadcasted and non-broadcasted media directed to children, our findings would further raise the red flag and provide relevant guidance for policymakers and public health experts through how to efficiently address such type of relationships in a way to limit exposure to these kinds of unhealthy products.