Sport team brand-equity index: a new measurement

Abstract

Purpose

Sport teams not only compete with other teams for the ultimate prize but also for a share of customer mind space. For winning fan loyalty and resultant economic success, management of sport teams need to focus on team-branding, and thus, developing and measuring a team’s brand equity becomes essential, which is the core purpose of this paper.

Design/methodology/approach

Current work builds upon previous efforts to develop a reliable and, more importantly, a parsimonious sport team brand-equity (STBE) index, as opposed to the usual multi-dimensional reflective scales, too complicated and not of much use to practitioners.

Findings

The authors propose that the STBE index having eight indicators is enough to capture the full domain of the concept and provide a snapshot about the ability of a team’s administration to create strong emotional bonds with its fans.

Research limitations/implications

Apart from demographics of the respondents, an important drawback is that the STBE index is from the perspective of television or online viewers and not those watching live in stadiums. This work contributes to extant sports brand equity literature by proposing a simpler scale made of casual variables, as opposed to reflective scales running into large number of similar items, a first of its kind in this domain. The authors also are able to forward the growing call for developing more of such scales through this effort.

Practical implications

Not only can the present scale be easily used by sport-marketers and researchers, it will be especially useful for marketing managers who want to associate their brands with sport teams, as it affects performance of their own brand.

Originality/value

The work represents a novel effort for developing a team-based brand equity and, to the authors’ knowledge, has not been attempted in this literature before.

Citation

Yousaf, A., Gupta, A. and Mishra, A. (2017), "Sport team brand-equity index: a new measurement", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 169-188. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIBR-07-2016-0069