Shaping Consumer Responses to Sport Sponsorship: The Role of Athlete Brand Image Dimensions

The growing commercial relevance of athletes as brand endorsers has led companies to invest significant resources in athlete sponsorship, yet the mechanisms through which different dimensions of an athlete's brand image influence consumer purchase intentions remain underexplored. Drawing on the Model of Athlete Brand Image (MABI) framework, this study examines how the three dimensions affect purchase intention toward the sponsor, both directly and through the mediating roles of sponsor trust and sponsor image, with perceived congruence as a moderator. The model is tested across two groups exposed to athletes with contrasting brand profiles using PLS-SEM, including mediation, moderation, and multigroup analysis. The study contributes to the sponsorship literature by moving beyond the treatment of athlete brand image as a unitary construct and investigating which specific dimensions drive consumer responses, how they operate through different pathways, and whether athletes with different profiles activate the same mechanisms or produce different structural relationships.