Dr. Joliss Helen George
Assistant ProfessorAbout
Dr. Joliss Helen George is an academic and researcher specializing in Sports Marketing, Global Business, and Consumer Behaviour. She holds a PhD in Sports Marketing from Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and an MBA in Global Business from the Manipal Institute of Management. Her research interests span sports sponsorship, consumer behaviour, brand engagement, and the psychological factors that shape consumer decision-making.
Her doctoral research examined the impact of sponsorship on consumer perceptions in the context of the Indian Premier League (IPL), focusing on the relationships among team identification, sponsor-team fit, brand awareness, and purchase intention toward sponsor brands. Her work has been recognized academically, including a second runner-up award for Best Paper Presentation at the 5th International Conference on Challenges in Emerging Economies, hosted by the K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management, Mumbai, in December 2022.
Dr. George has taught as visiting faculty at Manipal University, Manipal, across both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. She currently serves as Assistant Professor at the School of Business, RV University, Bengaluru, where she contributes to teaching, research, and academic development.
Beyond academia, Dr. George brings a distinctive athletic background to her work: she is a Black Belt (2nd Dan) holder and an Asian gold medalist in Karate and a state-ranked table tennis player. This combination of scholarly expertise and competitive sporting experience gives her a distinctive, grounded perspective on the intersection of business, marketing, sports, and consumer behaviour.
Focus: The study examines what drives Indian Premier League (IPL) fans’ emotional bond with their team ("team identification") and how that bond translates into sponsorship effectiveness, specifically team-sponsor fit, sponsor brand awareness, and purchase intention toward sponsor brands.
Theoretical grounding: Drawing on attachment theory and social identity theory, the research tests three "points of attachment": to the sport, to individual players, and to the team’s home region as antecedents of team identification among indirect consumers (fans following via TV/OTT, not live attendance).
Method: A quantitative, survey-based design (526 usable responses) collected from Bengaluru-based fans during the 2023 IPL season, analyzed using PLS-SEM (SmartPLS-4) to test the full model across three real sponsor brands: Qatar Airways, PUMA, and Reliance Jio.
Key findings: All three attachment points (sport, player, region) significantly and positively predict team identification, which in turn significantly drives team-sponsor fit, sponsor brand awareness, and ultimately purchase intention, consistently across all three sponsor brands tested.
Moderation results: Age did not moderate any of the relationships in the study. Education had a very limited moderating effect. It negatively moderated the team identification–team-sponsor fit link for Qatar Airways and moderated the team-sponsor fit–brand awareness link for PUMA but showed no effect elsewhere.
Practical takeaway: Regional attachment to the team emerged as a particularly powerful driver for building fan identification, offering sponsors and franchises a concrete pathway (attachment → identification → fit → awareness → purchase) for designing more effective sponsorship strategies.
Contribution: The thesis offers both theoretical contributions and managerial implications for how brands can strategically align with IPL teams to maximize sponsorship ROI.
Research Interests
Sports Marketing and Management, Consumer Behaviour and Brand Management
Secured the second runner-up award for the best paper presentation at the 5th International Conference on Challenges in Emerging Economies by K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management in December 2022.
Dr. Joliss Helen George
Assistant Professor
Ph.D.School of Economics and Business
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jolissheleng@rvu.edu.in -
Bengaluru
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