The impact of sponsorship on brand equity in electronic sports activities: A case study of League of Legends

Regardless of people's language, religion, race, nationality, age and gender, the ability of sports to bring people together makes sports an important platform for both brands and brands' audience. As a result of technological developments, electronic sports called today's modern sports have emerged alongside sports such as football and basketball. Electronic sports has become an important platform to reach the young people who follow the technology with interest. Brands often use sponsorship activities to communicate with this audience. In this study, sponsorships at electronic sports were examined and League of Legends were discussed in detail as a genre of electronic sports. The purpose of this research is to determine how these sponsorships affect brand equity dimensions and how brand equity dimensions affect overall brand equity. During the gathering of research data, a questionnaire was formulated by the dimensions of sponsorship perceptions by Speed and Thompson and the brand equity dimensions and overall brand equity dimension of Yoo, Donthu and Lee. In terms of representing the League of Legends followers who are the universe of the research, convenience sampling from the non-probability sampling methods was used and a total of 527 people returned to the survey. Analysis of the research data was made through SPSS 23 and AMOS 21 programs. In the analyzes, descriptive tests such as percent, frequency and cross tables, correlation tests like regression and difference tests such as t and F were used. As a result of the analysis of the data, it has been determined that consumer perceptions of sponsorship in electronic sports activities affects brand equity dimensions and brand equity dimensions affect overall brand equity.