In addition, SportSIG’s “Paper of the Year” in Sport Marketing is “The color of support: The effect of sponsor-team visual congruence on sponsorship performance.” Published in the Journal of Marketing in 2019, the paper was authored by Conor M. Henderson, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business, Marc Mazodier, Professor of Marketing and Khalaf Al Habtoor Chair in Business Sciences at Zayed University, and Aparna Sundar, a faculty member with the University of Washington at Bothell’s School of Business.

Quester, Professor in Marketing at Adelaide Business School and Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice President at the University of Adelaide, has been awarded the Distinguished Career Contributions to the Scientific Understanding of Sport Business Award. Quester has published nearly 150 refereed journal articles and more than 90 refereed conference proceeding papers, many with a focus on sponsorship effectiveness, management, and practices, and has co-authored three leading textbooks. Her work across sponsorship-linked marketing, consumer behavior, and relationship marketing has been cited nearly 7,000 times. She has been awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite (the French Order of Merit) and earned the title of Distinguished Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.

Stadler Blank, Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Williams College of Business at Xavier University, has been named winner of the 2020 “Emerging Scholar in Sport Marketing” award. Stadler Blank, who earned a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University in 2016, has co-authored publications in several leading journals such as the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Management Science, Marketing Letters, Sport Management Review, and Sport Marketing Quarterly.

Published in the Journal of Marketing in 2019, the work of Henderson, Mazodier, and Sundar represented an innovative examination of the recent trend of brand marketers adopting a sponsored team’s colors when displaying their logo in sponsorship settings. To test the efficacy of such approaches, Henderson, Mazodier, and Sundar conducted a real-world investigation that incorporated data from 1,358 participants spanning three studies. The study’s findings revealed the importance of color beyond its connotative meaning, providing evidence that marketers should consider co-branding flexibility when communicating a brand’s support for a sponsored partner. The research also builds upon the literature on congruence in sponsorship, finding positive effects of visual congruence above and beyond conceptual or geographic congruence.

Panels of judges comprised of former SportSIG awardees chose winners in each category from the groups of nominees. Each award winner will be presented with a plaque and honored at a special pre-conference event prior to the 2020 AMA Summer Academic Conference in San Francisco in August.