Attitudes Towards Olympic Games

Generally, this study is one of very few studies to actively explore consumers’ attitudes towards specified “unhealthy” food and beverage companies sponsoring the Olympic Games. This paper has found a perceived difference between the attitudes towards the discussed sponsors and the Olympic Games held by consumers, indicating that there might be foregone revenue, as well as lower customer satisfaction on the side of the Olympic Games. This can be seen in the fact that most significantly, the Olympic Games are generally perceived as being healthy, and their discussed sponsors, namely McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Heineken and Cadbury, are unhealthily attributed. After the health-related issues and problems have been widely analyzed and acknowledged by

However, it is acknowledged that not all potential concerns can be resolved beforehand and are therefore sensitively acted against in the conduction of the research. In regards to the data collection process it could be argued that there is a possibility of participants facing personal and potentially embarrassing health-related or body-image issues in response to the questions asked during the study. Due to this, it is of uttermost importance to guarantee data confidentiality, anonymity and cultural empathy while conducting both the interviews, as well as the questionnaire. Related to this aspect, it should be assured that all data provided by the participants is collected on a consensual

More specifically, as previously indicated, 88% of the respondents identified themselves as belonging to the age group 18-25 years, providing a very skewed result on this basis. Building on this fact, the highest educational level attained by the majority of the respondents is the high-school diploma, followed by the Bachelor’s degree, which is related to the young age of the participants. Also, in relation to the young age, stands the particular website used to distribute the questionnaire, namely Facebook. This is coherent with previous studies, in regards to the fact that Facebook users mainly represent the younger generation, which furtherly explains the skewedness in the response set. Even though the response set is not representative for the whole population in the general sense, it is more or less representative of the Olympic Games’ audience, as this is made up of mainly young people. The properties of the response group limit the possibilities to segment it for the purpose of analyzing diverse respondent groups.

This, however, should not pose an extensive limitation as a segmentation of the response set is not of relevance, due to the fact that the Olympic Games focus on global customers, from all countries and additionally, they do not target either females or males