Empirical Research On Sporting Star Endorsement's Influences On Brand Equity

The success of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, ignite the passion to sports of our people. With accelerate development of Economy, Society and Sports Activities in our country, the sports industry is shaping itself as an independent industry. Especially under the background of professionalization, commercialization, and industrialization of the athletic sports, sporting stars become well-known for many people and get many contracts of endorsement from enterprises, and even some local government of cities. However, successes and failures do exist in the same time. Apparently, the research on the influence of sporting star endorsement on brand equity is not enough.This article consists of seven parts and details are as following: Part one is an introduction. In this part, this paper specifies the study background by starting: the importance of sporting star endorsement is showing itself in a more and more apparent way, but there is not enough theoretical research in this field. Part two is a summary on the existing research papers on the sporting star endorsement. This part mainly summarizes the past research papers on the sporting star endorsement, and put forward some meaningful research materials for this paper. Part two is literature review on brand equity which is the theory base of whole paper. Firstly, this paper put forward the concepts of brand equity and summarizes some famous discussions on this concept. Secondly, based on the concept of brand equity, this paper comprehensively introduced the theoretical model of brand equity. Then, this paper generalized the process and model of how to measure brand equity. Part four is about the fundamental hypothesis and theoretical model in this study. Part five is a summary of the process of the empirical research based on the fundamental hypothesis and model. Part six is about the analysis of results of this study. Based on the analysis of these results, this paper brings forward some meaningful suggestions for practitioners. Part seven is about creativity, disadvantages of this research. On the base of concluding the problems we meet in the whole process of research, this paper also raises some suggestion for further study.