Every time the NBA Finals (or any sports championship for that matter) come around, it strikes me that so many people are extremely averse to someone rooting for a team who isn’t a true fan.
This made me think to connect my ongoing research on a new consequence of brand attachment to the bandwagon hate phenomenon.
Why might a committed fan might be upset that someone who they perceive to be less committed is rooting for their team to win?
At first, I thought that the problem for the committed fans was that other people were rooting for their team. That didn’t make sense to me, though, because just rooting for one’s favorite team to win shouldn’t create adverse feelings. The only problem that might occur for the committed fans is if they thought the bandwagon fans’ support was disingenuous.
What I think is more probable is the perception of the bandwagon fans’ commitment to the sports team.
By definition, bandwagon fans only begin to support a team when they are doing well. That suggests that when the team was not doing so well, the bandwagon fans were nowhere to be found. For a committed fan, that may come across negatively. A committed fan has suffered through the rough years and remained loyal to the team. When the team finally performs well, their loyalty is rewarded with the ability to celebrate in the team’s success in earnest.
Some of my on-going research offers a theoretical answer to this phenomenon. This research builds on work that distinguishes exchange relationships from communal ones (Goffman 1961) and suggests that consumers with high brand attachment might view brand commitment as a viable means to reciprocate benefits to their favorite brands. In the bandwagoners’ case, diehard fans may perceive them to reap the benefits of cheering on a winning team without reciprocating the required commitment. A whole load of psychological research suggests that people don’t like when others violate such a norm of reciprocity.
What’s interesting about the animosity toward bandwagon fans, though, is that it does not necessarily have to be a fan of the bandwagon team who points out the norm violation or has negative feelings toward the bandwagon fan. Let’s say I see a bandwagon fan tweeting, “Go Warriors!” As a Laker fan who is currently struggling through their rebuilding phase, I’ll probably have less respect for that fan because they do not deserve whatever benefits come with claiming the Warriors as their team. I would feel better as a committed fan of a different team if I saw them qualify their transient fandom with, “I’m just rooting for them in this series,” or “I’m not a real Warriors fan.”
What do you think?
