Athlete Endorser’s Transgression and Sport Consumer’s Moral Reasoning Strategy: Moral Coupling and Boundary Conditions.

Abstract

Despite the benefit of athlete endorsement as a viable marketing communication strategy, the potential risks of such campaigns and their consequences have received little attention from scholars. In particular, the various moral reasoning processes of sport consumers, which are triggered by athletes’ moral transgressions, deserve greater attention, as these psychological mechanisms can affect consumers’ perceptions of brands associated with morally contaminated athletes. The moral reasoning strategies of sport consumers play a crucial role in enabling researchers and practitioners to better understand diverse responses toward the moral transgressions of athlete endorsers. Contemporary research on moral disengagement seems to suggest that this reasoning approach enables the individuals to support of a wrongdoer. However, there still exist situations in the sport marketplace that cannot be explained with moral decoupling (separate performance judgments from morality judgments) and moral rationalization (justify immoral behavior in evaluating a wrongdoer). For instance, some people may find it difficult to either separate performance judgments, or justify immoral behavior of a wrongdoer, and then may tend to conflate both performance and morality judgments when they process celebrity ethical transgressions of athletes. In order to address this theoretical gap, this dissertation mainly focuses on identifying and validating ‘moral coupling’ (the integration of morality and performance judgments) as a distinctive yet important moral reasoning process that uniquely functions in the athlete endorsement context. By presenting a series of four experiments, this research and analysis is intended to provide an expanded theoretical framework that facilitates a better understanding of diverse moral reasoning processes, and subsequent responses. Study 1 theorizes and validates the existence of moral coupling as an alternative reasoning process. In addition, this dissertation examines the impact of several potential boundary conditions of moral reasoning strategies and consumer evaluations such as transgression type; the functional fit between athlete and brand (Study 2); and the sociocultural background of sport consumers (Study 3). Finally, causal relationships between fan identification, moral emotions, moral reasoning strategies, and consumer evaluations of an athlete in relation to an associated brand are examined via an actual transgression case involving a celebrity athlete (Study 4).