The Impact of Different Ambush Marketing Disclosure Strategies on Brand Attitude

Event organizers as well as event sponsors devote large amounts of money to limit ambush marketing activities at major sport events and to protect the sponsorship value. As it is not possible to protect all sponsor rights by law, event organizers implement counter-ambushing strategies to make event spectators aware of the positive effects of sponsorship and the negative effects of ambush marketing. Little is known, however, how consumers respond to different ambush marketing disclosure strategies in terms of their attitudes toward ambush marketers. Drawing on the goodwill concept and the persuasion knowledge model, an experiment investigates the effects of no disclosure and two different disclosure strategies (“information & education” vs. “name & shame”) and compares them with respondents’ attitudes toward sponsors and nonsponsors.