How social media’s influence endorsement revenues for high level athletes?

Details

Supervisors

Schuiling Isabelle ; Lejeune Christophe

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en ingénieur de gestion

Abstract

In the last two decades, the world faced the emergence of social media. The development of the online platforms brought to high level athlete a number of new challenges and participated to expand their popularity worldwide. With social media top athletes became unintentionally online influencers. Indeed, social media platforms did not mark the beginning of sport marketing and athlete brand image marketing but it started a new type of promotion. Thanks to social media high level athlete endorsement revenue were boosted. In a view of perpetual profit maximization, how should athlete social media should be managed to better their endorsement revenues? Having a very few research pointing out the real impact of social media in athletes endorsements revenue we decided to establish the actual state of the literature on the subject. This is the reason why a large part of the literature on the marketing of sport, athletes and social media was covered. The goal of our research was to bring some insights to a very narrow subject. We found out that there was a lack of scientific literature on the correlation between high level athletes’ endorsement revenues and their social media metrics, and yet most of the people assume that they are linked. To our mind, it was necessary to expose all the knowledge on topics related to endorsement revenue, high level athletes and their social media. By presenting different model and different opinion in the literature on our subject, we were able to approach the role of social media in athletes’ endorsement revenues. Due to an exhaustive theoretical part were able to tackle the practical part in the best way possible regardless the lack of research on the influence of social media on athlete’s endorsement revenues. The goal of this thesis, is to determine whether social media have an influence or not on high level athletes endorsement revenue, the purpose of our work is to answer the following problematic: How social media’s influence endorsement revenues for high level athletes? We will consider the real endorsement revenues of known athlete and confront them to their social media and their metrics. To answer our problematic we will adopt a qualitative comparative analysis similarly to the methodology observed different articles presented in our literature research. The first part of this paper will comprise the literature review on the topic and analyse carefully all the knowledge on the link between athletes endorsement revenues and their social media metrics. More specifically, we will introduce concepts such as sport marketing and influencer marketing. Next we will concentrate on social media marketing, going through social media influencers, the theory behind influencer marketing and the value of an elite athlete as influencer in the Era of social media. We will then conceptualize athlete brand equity and illustrate it with some interesting measurement models. Finally we will tackle product endorsement on social media for celebrities and more specifically professional athletes The second part of this thesis is devoted to the settings of our hypothesis. These hypotheses are built on our literature review and chosen in order to give to most concise answer possible to our problematic. Based on the findings of the first part these hypotheses try to establish the particularity of high level athletes’ influencer. These hypotheses propose affirmation about the link between high level athlete’s endorsement revenue and their social media activity. The final part starts with a brief presentation of the social media studied in our paper namely: Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We will then expose our methodology and explain how we collected our data. The starting point of our database is the 2019 Forbes annual top 100 world highest paid athlete. The Forbes ranking was then completed with social media metrics specific to each athlete in the list and theirdifferent social media. Each hypothesis set in the second part will then be tested and discussed.