ABSTRACT
Adding a corporate name to an existing or new sport venue has become an increasingly popular trend in the United States since the late 1990s. This new type of sponsorship agreement allows both the city and the team to reduce the often-heavy financial burdens of paying both construction and operational costs. The naming rights phenomenon can be explained by social identity theory, which suggests that people tend to create a group identity that must be different from other groups' identities. In addition, when an external force is applied to weaken the unique identity of a social group, members in that group feel afraid of losing their own identity. The information obtained from this chapter provides practical implications for managers/marketers in collegiate athletics and among corporate sponsors. The small effect sizes of the statistically significant results and the statistically nonsignificant results could be attributed to potential biases in the sample characteristics.
