Driving Digital Consumer Engagement for Sponsor Brands: The Case of FIFA World Cup 2022

This study aims to contribute to sponsorship-related research by exploring how the linguistic information cues of posts referring to event sponsors influence digital consumer engagement (DCE) in a mega-sports event. A total of 3,416 tweets (resulting in over 6.24 million engagements) published on 25 sponsors of the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar are collected using the X (Twitter) API. The study examines the influence of linguistic cues, including drives, affective cues, cognitive cues, and social language, in sponsor-related content on DCE. The study reveals that using drives and cognitive language positively impacts DCE through the central information processing route. Affective language and social language enhance DCE through the peripheral information processing route. From a managerial perspective, the findings underscore the importance of tailoring tweet content to align with different motivational drivers of consumers, thus enhancing DCE.