Engagement in sports virtual brand communities
Abstract The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of sports sponsorship in virtual brand communities (VBCs) on consumers' engagement within these communities. We used a professional team in the Scotiabank National Opening Championship (Chile) as the study context and collected data from participants (N = 268) on the team's social networks. We used structural equation systems and the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique to test the hypotheses. The results present five causal combinations, considering factors inherent to the team sponsor that influence engagement within a VBC. The QCA model and SEM explain 78.5% and 71% of engagement, respectively. The most noteworthy variab…
Influence of the Virtual Brand Community in Sports Sponsorship
This study explores how the virtual brand community (VBC) of soccer-team supporters influences the brand's attitude toward sponsorship according to the theory of image transfer. The study provides a comparative analysis using both structural equation modeling (SEM) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). A total of 609 supporters of a professional, first-division Spanish soccer team provide the data. The results from SEM support the importance of control, attitude toward the team, and identification variables. However, SEM cannot assure the usefulness of variables such as trust and opportunism when evaluating the resulting attitude toward the sponsor. The results from the fuzzy-set QCA …