Investigating the role of advertisements on referees' uniforms in the Premier League on brand awareness among television viewers

Abstract
Today, commercial brands can introduce their brand and products to millions of viewers by advertising around the playground, or at least encourage them to visit their website (Kazemipour et al., 2020). In fact, companies try to communicate the positive emotions resulting from sports competitions to their brand, and by advertising in sports events and connecting the value and excitement of these games, a positive feeling towards their advertising and as a result to their brand to create. This positive feeling strengthens the position of the brand in the minds of consumers and increases the probability of purchase (Rashidzadeh et al., 2014). Brand awareness is the first stage of familiarizing an audience with the brand. Brand awareness is one of the points that perhaps most of the world's famous and popular brands are well familiar with and new brands are trying to achieve. But brand awareness can be very useful for brands that are still unknown or people are not very familiar with it (Asadollahi et al., 2021). In many studies, the effect of advertising on brand awareness, brand value and customers' purchase decisions has been discussed. In this regard, Asadollahi et al. (2021) found in a study that there is a positive and significant relationship between advertising tools and brand identity and the commitment of sports consumers in football. Now one of the main pillars of a football match is the referee. It seems that referees can be an attractive option for various companies to introduce their products, considering their decisive role in football matches. All the mentioned cases indicate that the people and the media pay too much attention to the issue of arbitration. So, as it is known, referees can advertise like sports teams and get financial support in this way. According to the said content and the attention of the media and viewers to the referees and their performance in the Premier League football matches, and also considering that there has been no research on the commercial role of football referees, and in order to develop the findings in this field, the researcher Looking for an answer to the question, does advertising on the uniforms of Premier League football referees have a role in brand awareness among television viewers? In terms of its nature and purpose, the current research is applied and in terms of implementation, it is placed in the category of pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental research. The statistical population of the research was the television viewers of the premier football league in 2022. Sampling in this research was among the people who watch Premier League soccer games on TV. That is, one of the criteria for entering the study is the answer to the question of whether they watch Premier League games on television or not. If the answer is positive, the sample was included in the research process. It should be noted that the questionnaire was presented in two stages. One stage before the start of the Premier League and two weeks before the start of the Premier League from 1 June 2022 to 15 June 2022 and the second stage 2 months after the start of the Premier League, the second stage questionnaire was distributed and collected. The financial sponsor of the referees of the Premier League in the season of 2021-2022 is Pars Oil Company, and the brand awareness of this company should be investigated. The sampling method was available sampling, 30 people were selected and placed in the research experimental group. The data collection tool required for the research is a standard 16-question brand awareness questionnaire by Fereydoni and Kalate (2016) with 5 components (product type, product availability, mental associations, audience engagement and understanding of brand value) on a five-point Likert scale (from totally disagree score 1 to totally agree score 5). In this research, the opinion of the experts regarding the research questionnaire was made and they confirmed the validity of the research tool. Also, in order to check the reliability of the tool, Cronbach's alpha test was used and it was confirmed at a high level (above 0.7). In this research, in order to describe the data, descriptive statistics and frequency, frequency percentage, and central and dispersion indices were used, and at the level of inferential statistics, dependent t-test was used with the help of SPSSv22 statistical software. The descriptive findings of the research showed that the average age of the samples was 33.5 years with a standard deviation of 1.35. The highest frequency of education level was related to bachelor's degree holders with 18 people. The awareness of the brand was 2.29 in the pre-test and 3.59 in the post-test. Also, in the pre-test, the product type component with an average of 2.63 is the highest and the lowest average is related to availability with an average of 2.24. In the post-test, the component of mental associations with an average of 3.74 is the highest and the lowest average is related to the type of product with an average of 3.51.
The results show that in the pre-test and post-test, the significance levels of the dependent t-test are less than 0.05. Therefore, it can be said that the null hypothesis of the research is rejected and the opposite hypothesis is accepted, that is, advertisements on the uniforms of referees of the Premier League play a role in the awareness of the brand in television viewers. The results of the research showed that there was a significant difference in the components between the pre-test and the post-test, which shows the effect of advertising on the clothes of the Premier League referees on brand awareness among television viewers. The results of the conducted research indicate that some companies producing global products have also taken advantage of the popularity of the football game and by paying huge sums of money, they ask football players to use the products of these companies, whether in the field of sports life or to use it outside, so that the fans of that particular player or his respective club will also be led to use these products, which confirms the results of the present research. According to the results of the present research as well as the research literature, it can be said that football is one of the sports that has no end and the popularity of this sport is increasing day by day. Considering that football is an important sport, as a result, referees of the Premier League are also an important part of the football competition and their mistakes or sensitive decisions can affect the match, so advertising on the clothes of the referees of the Premier League can be Be effective in the eyes of the audience and viewers. According to the results of the research, it is suggested that in order to improve the awareness of the brand of the contracting parties with the football referees' committee, these advertisements should also be carried out at the level of the provincial games. Also, in order to improve the awareness of the brand of the companies contracting with the football referee committee, advertising should be done on the personal pages of the referees in the virtual space, and in order to improve the engagement of the audience, the selected products of the companies should also be included on the clothes.