The Impact of Hedonic and Meaningful Messages on Sport Consumers’ Responses to Athlete Foundations: A Focus on Fan Identification Level

Athletes oftentimes own and direct their own philanthropic foundations to make positive prosocial impacts at every level, from global down to local. A key challenge for these foundations is to communicate effectively with their target audiences to obtain support from them. By drawing from the construal-level theory and athlete identification literature, the current study examines the effects of different types of messages (hedonic vs. meaningful) on sport consumers’ supportive behaviors toward an athlete’s charitable foundation as a function of fans’ level of athlete identification. Results indicated that the use of a meaningful message lead to greater degrees of supportive behavior from sport consumers with low levels of athlete identification than on- and off-field hedonic messages. In contrast, among highly identified sport consumers, both hedonic and meaningful messages elicited greater support for an athlete-owned foundation.