The Olympic Games and associative sponsorship: Brand personality identity creation, communication and congruence

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the brand relationships between a mega-sports event, the Olympic Games, and its branded main sponsors, using the lens of brand personality. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses the internet-based website communications of the sponsor and event brands to assess congruence in brand personality identity exhibited in the communications of sponsors and how these relate to the event brand itself. A lexical analysis of the website text identifies and graphically represents the dominant brand personality traits of the brands relative to each other. Findings: The results show the Olympic Games is communicating excitement as a leading brand personality dimension. Sponsors of the Olympics largely take on its dominant brand dimension, but do not adapt their whole brand personality to that of the Olympics and benefit by adding excitement without losing their individual character. The transference is more pronounced for long-running sponsors. Practical implications: Sponsorship of the Olympic Games does give brands the opportunity to capture or borrow the excitement dimension alongside building or reinforcing their own dominant brand personality trait or to begin to subtly alter their brand positioning. Originality/value: This study is the first to examine how the sponsor’s brand aligns with the event being sponsored as a basis for developing a strong shared image and associative dimensions complimentary to the positioning of the brand itself

Socialpædagogik og digital kommunikation for ægtefæller til mennesker med demens: – Understøttelse af sociale og eksistentielle udfordringer i spændingsfeltet mellem standardiserede løsninger og socialpædagogisk praksis

ResumeArtiklen tager udgangspunkt i projektet Demantec om digital kommunikation til understøttelse af livskvalitet for ægtefæller til mand eller hustru med demens. Det empiriske materiale er produceret i et feltstudie. Analysen viser udfordringer hos ægtefæller til mand eller hustru med demens, og hvordan en digital platform til understøttelse af livskvalitet for ægtefællerne bliver modtaget i praksis. Artiklen har fokus på ægtefællernes eksistentielle og sociale udfordringer, og diskuterer mulighederne for at understøtte disse ved inddragelse af socialpædagogiske traditioner om dannelse som eksistentielt projekt og inkluderende fællesskaber – med en digital platform som supplerende teknologi. Abstract: Social Pedagogy and digital communication to support life quality for spouses to people with dementia.This article is part of the Demantec project investigating how spouses to people with dementia experience quality of life, and how social pedagogy and the use of digital communication have potentials to influence their quality of life. Based on interviews with spouses and field studies on cafes for spouses, the article argues that their need for information about dementia and dialogue, about their social and existential challenges in everyday life, are substantial. The discussions shed light on if and how digital communication can accommodate these needs. The conclusion is that there are potentials in a social pedagogical approach in practice using digital communication for supporting the needs of spouses

Environmentally sustainable food consumption : a review and research agenda from a goal-directed perspective

The challenge of convincing people to change their eating habits toward more environmentally sustainable food consumption (ESFC) patterns is becoming increasingly pressing. Food preferences, choices and eating habits are notoriously hard to change as they are a central aspect of people's lifestyles and their socio-cultural environment. Many people already hold positive attitudes toward sustainable food, but the notable gap between favorable attitudes and actual purchase and consumption of more sustainable food products remains to be bridged. The current work aims to (1) present a comprehensive theoretical framework for future research on ESFC, and (2) highlight behavioral solutions for environmental challenges in the food domain from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, starting from the premise that food consumption is deliberately or unintentionally directed at attaining goals, a goal-directed framework for understanding and influencing ESFC is built. To engage in goal-directed behavior, people typically go through a series of sequential steps. The proposed theoretical framework makes explicit the sequential steps or hurdles that need to be taken for consumers to engage in ESFC. Consumers need to positively value the environment, discern a discrepancy between the desired versus the actual state of the environment, opt for action to reduce the experienced discrepancy, intend to engage in behavior that is expected to bring them closer to the desired end state, and act in accordance with their intention. Second, a critical review of the literature on mechanisms that underlie and explain ESFC (or the lack thereof) in high-income countries is presented and integrated into the goal-directed framework. This contribution thus combines a top-down conceptualization with a bottom-up literature review; it identifies and discusses factors that might hold people back from ESFC and interventions that might promote ESFC; and it reveals knowledge gaps as well as insights on how to encourage both short- and long-term ESFC by confronting extant literature with the theoretical framework. Altogether, the analysis yields a set of 33 future research questions in the interdisciplinary food domain that deserve to be addressed with the aim of fostering ESFC in the short and long term

The Impact of User Weight on Brands and Business Practices in Mass Market Fashion

Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. If they were, it would be in line with branding theory supporting the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands. However, fashion companies do not confess to such practices. To shed some light on the subject, I have conducted two studies. The first attempts to illustrate what effect, if any, user imagery has on fashion brands. It is an experiment designed to show how the weight of users affects consumers’ perceptions of mass market fashion brands. The findings show that consumers’ impressions of mass market fashion brands are significantly affected by the weight of its users. The effect of male user imagery is ambiguous. For women’s fashion on the other hand, slender users are to be preferred. In the second study I examine what effects these effects have on assortments. I compare the sizes of mass market clothes to the body sizes of the population. No evidence of discrimination of overweight or obese consumers was found -quite the contrary. The reasons for these unexpected findings may be explained by the requirements a brand must fulfil to make management of the customer base for user imagery purposes viable. The brand must be sensitive to user imagery; a requirement that mass market fashion fulfils. However, it must also be feasible for a company to exclude customers, and while garment sizes can be restricted to achieve this, the high volume sales strategy of mass market fashion apparently cannot