Date of Award

Spring 2018

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (BS)

Advisor(s)

Peter Johnson

Abstract

Stadium sponsorship and renaming have become highly visible in professional sports in the United States. Currently, the top twelve corporate naming-rights sponsorships in the US are worth $3.3 billion, and the number of stadia without corporate names continues to shrink each year (Badenhausen, 2016). Naming-rights sponsors include some of the largest corporations in America including AT&T, Citicorp, and numerous consumer products companies. Yet, with all this investment there has been little quantitative research on the effects of corporate renaming of sports venues. This research makes an initial step to analyze the effects of stadium renaming in professional sports, particularly on fans' purchasing decisions on team and sponsors' products. This topic is important due to the meteoric rise of naming-rights sponsorship in professional sports. This research utilizes a survey instrument and variables previously developed for research measuring effects of naming-rights sponsorships on college football fans’ purchasing intentions (Eddy, 2014) and applies them to the professional sports market. The results demonstrate a passive willingness of fans of professional sports teams to accept the renaming of their favorite teams' stadia. The saturation of current naming-rights deals has accustomed the modern sports fan to commercialism in sports, and the survey results will support this theory.

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