Identifying factors affecting the value of advertisements on football clubs' and players' social media : a discrete choice analysis

Purpose: Advertisers frequently use social media for interactive and customer-oriented relationship marketing (RM) purposes. Moreover, sports clubs and players have been using their social media accounts to post content of their sponsors and other advertising companies. Such posts create visibility and have value for these advertising companies, something which has not been empirically quantified in the existing literature. Hence, this paper's purpose is to identify the factors or attributes that influence the value of such advertisement posts. Design/methodology/approach: A discrete choice approach is used to empirically estimate the utility that sponsorship managers derive from a post advertising their company or product on football clubs' and players' social media. Findings: The results indicate that more followers, better on-field performance and a lower price significantly increase the advertising company's utility. Moreover, the used social media channel has a significant influence too, since Facebook and Instagram are preferred over Twitter, due to the latter's limited degrees of freedom for advertisers. Research limitations/implications: Considering additional factors such as the image fit between sponsor and sponsee and presence on the Chinese social media market offers an interesting avenue for future research. Practical implications: The empirical estimates allow commercial managers of clubs and players to derive companies' relative willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in characteristics of advertisements on their social media from the calculated utilities. This information can be used in the pricing decision when social media posts are sold or included in sponsorship packages. Originality/value: This is the first study applying discrete choice modelling to link social media marketing (SMM) and sports marketing.