Evaluating the Key Factors of Athlete Endorsers

[[abstract]]Nowadays with the awareness of sports and exercising, including events that hold only once every four years such as the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup and the Olympic Games, and also many other professional sport games are constantly creating more values to the sport and recreational industry. Therefore, sport brand companies are becoming more competitive and in order to differentiate from other companies, they often turn to celebrities or athletes to endorse their products and services. The aim of this research is to determine which key factor is the most important for an athlete endorser, to discover each factor’s weight, and determine which sport requires an athlete endorser more in comparison. This research study plans to evaluate the key factors of an athlete endorser. After reviewing previous literature and studies of different dimensions of an athlete endorser, this research uses questionnaire surveys to collect data and apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the interrelations of different dimensions of the athlete brand image and discover customer tendency towards the key factors and point out the weight of each dimension of our thesis framework. A total of 117 questionnaires were distributed, deducting 7 invalid questionnaires, 110 valid questionnaires were collected eventually. While the majority of respondents were Taiwanese, we also collected data from Mongolia and Indonesia. The results show that all four main domains have significant and positive correlation, athletic performance is the most important domain, and expertise being the most important criteria, the least important domain is marketable lifestyle. The sport that requires an athlete endorser the most is basketball for all three countries. The main contribution of this thesis is to assist managers or sport brand companies on selecting a better athlete to endorse their products or brand