We find relatively low levels of co-occurrence in shared follower relationships between sport and non-sport esports titles. Methods and results: We investigate esports market partitions based on social network analysis of over 33 million unique Twitter users who follow the official accounts for one or more of 16 leading esports titles. The findings are relevant for academics and companies looking to better understand the brand image effects of sponsoring esports.Īims: The purpose of this study is to investigate the pattern of consumer relationships across popular esports titles to understand how the esports market is partitioned in terms of unique and shared social media followers across gaming titles. This image improvement is, however, dependent on multiple variables, including activation strategy, brand type, and target audience. The results showed that all experts believe that sponsoring esports can positively affect the sponsors’ brand image and roughly one-third of fans perceive more positively a small number of brands as a result of them sponsoring esports. The two data sets were analysed separately from one another, but the results were interpreted together and given the same level of importance. Quantitative data was processed on SPSS 25 and qualitative data on NVivo 10. Twenty-two experts in esports sponsorships were interviewed and 5,638 esports fans were surveyed. An exploratory focus was adopted along with a convergent-parallel mixed method with equal status. This research aimed to identify how esports sponsorships affect the sponsors’ brand image.

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