Nowadays sponsorship has become a vital part of the funding for a wide range of sporting, artistic, and social events because sponsors hope that supporters’ enthusiasm and interest on the event or their team will translate into long-term benefit for the sponsor. Also traditional communications vehicles such as advertising and sales promotion are faced with the challenges of reaching increasingly fragmented consumer markets and cutting through an overload of messages aimed at consumer (Meenaghan, 2001b).
The purpose of this study is to investigate how fan identification is important for the consumer behavior and brand loyalty. This study used 31-item survey questionnaire to conduct the research on fan identification with 285 respondents in order to identify relationship between fans’ attitudinal behavior; brand credibility, attitude toward brand and purchase intention, and brand loyalty.
This study was conducted Multivariate analysis method to investigate the fan identification importance role in sport sponsorship and the relationship between consumer behavior and brand loyalty. Statistical tests were employed to analyze the data gathered include, t-test, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model. Through the analysis research, the result of this study indicated that fan identification is positively related to brand credibility, attitude toward brand and purchase intention, and brand credibility is also positively related with attitude toward brand. Moreover, we found out that consumer attitudinal response are related with brand loyalty.
Based on the result and previous literatures, several recommendations can be made. First, fan identification is important for managers/marketers to understand the effect of sport sponsorship on members of their target population because the financial requirements of sponsorship increase, as do stakeholders’ expectations of measurable benefits to the firm. Second, managers/marketers should emphasis in choosing the team and sport event to sponsor based on fans’ identification with the team. These findings expected to help marketers or managers to emphasis the importance of fan identification and it’s effects on consumer behavior and brand loyalty.

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