Sport sponsorship,team support and purchase intentions

This research assessed the influence of team support and perception of sponsors on the purchase intentions of sport consumers. In a case study of a not‐for‐profit, membership‐based Australian professional football club, 1647 respondents reported their perceptions of team support, sponsor integrity and purchase intentions for the sponsor's products. Results revealed that the key pathway to purchase intention is associated with fan passion and a perception of sponsor integrity. This implies that the best mechanism for sponsor return on investment comes in the form of activities to bolster both passion for the team and perceptions of sponsor integrity.     

Brand personality in a membership‐based organisation

• This study employed Aaker's (6) brand personality framework to assess the brand characteristics of a membership based sport organisation in Australia (N=413). Factor analysis suggested that Aaker's framework did not fully capture variations in responses within the Australia sample, and that a modified version incorporating an additional dimension of Innovation was required. This modified factor structure may reflect characteristics of netball as a sport, specific sample attributes or cross‐cultural variations in the brand personality concept. Results indicate that the Netball Victoria brand is strongly associated with Competence, Sincerity and Innovation, is moderately linked with Excitement and Sophistication, and has a low connection with Ruggedness. These qualities are perceived with a high level of consistency by different respondents. The organisation's brand personality as perceived by its members provides a diagnostic which may be used to guide re‐branding, positioning and other marketing strategies. Additional research is required to assess the role and function of cultural variations in measuring brand personality.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the interpretation of diploma wage effects estimated by regression discontinuity designs

Several recent papers employ regression discontinuity (RD) designs to estimate the causal effect of a diploma or similar credentials on wages. I build a model of knowledge acquisition, test‐taking and labour market careers that mimics the settings studied in these papers. I show that a positive RD estimate is evidence for information frictions in the labour market, but caution that the relative importance of acquired knowledge and innate talent in the production function cannot be separately identified. While a positive RD estimate does not reveal whether students study too much or too little compared to the social optimum, the rate at which RD estimates decline with labour market experience indicates the speed of employer learning, a parameter that is critical for the extent of inefficiency in study choices.     

Conceptualising social risk and business risk associated with private sector development projects

There are various definitions of social risk. For some, social risk pertains to social protection, and risk-taking is thought to enhance human welfare. For others, social risk is contrasted with empirical risk, where the perception of risk by lay members of society differs from that of experts in any given field. More recently, social risk has come to be associated with the potential future negative social impacts of corporate activities and private sector development on individuals and groups. This paper theorises the relationships between social risk and business risk in the context of private sector developments. Many business leaders continue to conflate social risk with their existing understandings of business risk, with social risk understood to be the risk to the business arising from the actions of community stakeholders. Conceiving of social risk in this way has implications for the discrete identification, prevention and mitigation of social and business risks and impacts, and has ramifications for corporate risk management strategies, as well as companies’ relationships with community stakeholders.