NBA and sponsor personality congruency (Euclidean distance) results are presented in Table 9—6. Sponsorship fit scores range from 0 (worst fit) to 1 (best fit). The brands displaying the highest personality fit With the NBA, athletic footwear and isotonic beverage, are functionally related the sport of basketball. For the athletic footwear category, Nike (1.00) and Reebok (0.83) both had extremely high personality fits. Gatorade (0.74), an isotonic beverage, had the third-highest personality fit with the NBA of the brands analyzed. All three of thee of these brands, it should be noted, have had long associations with sports in general and with basketball in particular. The brand with the poorest fit is Wendy’s (0.00). The results once again demonstrate that consumers clearly perceive natural image links between certain brands: and sport.
In order to test for the presence of differences Within the sample in terms of personality ratings of the NBA, the sample Was divided into subgroups based on gender, NBA interest, NBA attendance, NBA viewership, and income. For the latter four categories, the sample Was split based on the median response. Overall, the results indicated little difference among the subgroups. The only significant difference Worth noting was for the NBA interest category. The results shown in Table 9-7 indicate that those with high NBA interest evaluated the NBA significantly higher on three factors, Sophisticated, Exciting, and Wholesome. In contrast, behaviors directly related to NBA interest (attendance and viewership) had no significant differences between high and low groupings of respondents.
Discussion
The regression analysis findings from Study 1 indicate that the perceptual sponsorship fit between a sport and a brand increases as their personalities become more congruent. This would suggest that in a salient sponsorship setting people consider the images held by the sport and the sponsog to assess the brand—sport affiliation. This conclusion was also reached in Study 2. These results support the first hypothesis (H1), that perceived sponsorship fit in- creases with the personality match between the sport and the brand. The Study 1 regression analysis also revealed that while personality fit was found to be a significant predictor of perceived sponsorship fit, demographic fit was not. This result clearly lends support to the second hypothesis (H2) that perceived sponsorship fit has a stronger positive relationship with brand—sport personality match than with brand—sport demographic match.