Athlete Endorsers

Every company creates marketing communications (marcoms) strategies that help boost the distinct competitive advantages of their products or services. Egan (2007) defined marcoms as “the means by which a supplier of goods, services, values and/or ideas represent themselves to their target audience with the goal of stimulating dialogue leading to better commercial or other relationships” (p. 1). The use of athlete endorsers is one of the more common marcoms strategies used as effective promotional tools that companies utilize to achieve their goals and objectives (Geurin-Eagleman & Clavio, 2015; Smith & Sanderson, 2015). According to Badenhausen (2015), the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes made $3.2 billion over a one-year period (2014-15).

Thus it can be seen that companies are willing to spend millions of dollars on athlete endorsement to enhance their promotional strategies in an attempt to associate their product images with athlete endorsers (Chang et al., 2014; Jones & Schumann, 2000; Stevens, Lathrop, & Bradish, 2003; Stone, Joseph, & Jones, 2003).
Athletes often secure multi-million dollar endorsement contracts from companies that want to be affiliated with sports figures (McCarthy, 2015). McCarthy noted that many of the highest endorsement deals with Major League Baseball (MLB) players, National Basketball Association (NBA) players, National Football League (NFL) players, and international soccer players worldwide. These four sports (baseball, basketball, football, and soccer) are team sports and there might be at times limited endorsement opportunities when compared to individual sports. Athletes in individual sports (e.g., tennis, golf, racing, boxing) are more flexible when it comes to getting endorsements from various companies because they are not

Most social media sites provide users with the ability to add a picture of themselves on their profiles, and these photos serve a particular role in the online self-presentation context (Siibak, 2010). Previous research has revealed several strategies that are frequently adopted by social media users to construct positive self-images (e.g., Dominick, 1999; Papacharissi, 2002; Tsou et al., 2016; Zhao, Grasmuch, & Martin, 2008) through the use of their profile pictures. Therefore, this study examines how professional athletes portray themselves in social media profile pictures and which online self-presentation strategies they use for their profile