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Britannia Building Society has launched a collec tion of financial services products in partnership with Manchester United Football Club. Other products have also been launched that are designed ‘exclusively for Manchester City Supporters’. These brand alliances are particularly interesting because both parties have ‘membership clubs’ which reward customers for loyalty. The nature of member association with the respective clubs is different. Britannia Building Society (Britannia) is a mutual building society in the tradition in which investors and borrowers are building society members. Manchester United Football Club (MUFC) is a leading football club and a major consumer brand. The brand straplines on the two Rewards leaflets capture this difference: Britannia: ‘where membership means a great deal’ MUFC: ‘you win, we win’.

The purpose of this study is to understand the structure and dynamics of minority equity sponsorship agreements and the motivations for organizations to go beyond traditional sponsorships by acquiring minority equity in the sponsored organization.

This paper adopts a qualitative methodology and presents interview data from key actors involved in minority equity sponsorship agreements.

The findings of the paper include major characteristics of minority equity sponsorship agreements including the motivations, dynamics and resources exchanged by sponsoring firms and clubs in these relationships, based on the experiences of key actors from firms, clubs and other key stakeholders, and a conceptual model for forming and maintaining these relationships.

Sponsorships are increasingly evolving into minority equity sponsorship agreements, particularly in the European market. The findings of this study assist sponsoring firms and the executives of clubs in better understanding the dynamics and stakeholder-related consequences of these relations.

The findings of this paper illustrate the differences between minority equity sponsorship agreements and both traditional sponsorships and minority equity alliances. The findings also identify major characteristics of these relationships and the interdependencies among these characteristics.

The overall aim of this study is to improve our understanding of the strength of attraction factors of professional football club brands with foreign fans, and of the influence of demographics and individual characteristics on the influence of these factors in the context of sport spectatorship services.

This research was based on a quantitative study surveying 1,160 Chinese fans of English Premier League clubs and its results were produced through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. They identify the relative importance of 21 organisation– (e.g. star players, charismatic managers, team kits, partnerships and alliances, etc.), market and environment– (e.g. peer influence, TV coverage, etc.), and experience– (e.g. personal bonds, past attendance, etc.) induced service brand attraction points that were categorised into six main factors: star players, on-the-field performance, brand identity, marketing and merchandising, localism and experience.

Organisation-induced factors are the most important club brand attraction factors for Chinese fans. ANOVA analysis showed that demographic (i.e. gender, age, and education) and individual (i.e. brand identification and loyalty levels) characteristics influence the importance of attraction factors for fans. For instance, fans who had previously supported a different club brand rated the marketing and merchandising dimensions lower, localism higher, on-the-field performance lower and brand identity lower than those who had always supported the same club.

These results emphasise the importance of segmentation when considering consumer attraction to professional sport brands. They also provide specific practical knowledge that is useful when expanding into new foreign markets.

In 2005 Manchester United was taken over by US businessman Malcolm Glazer, in part because of the club's brand name prominence in the global sport of soccer. This paper examines how Manchester United rose to a pre-eminent position in world football through its on-field performances and its off-the-field management strategies. It shows how the club took its storied history into world markets to take full advantage of globalisation, the opportunities extended through the English Premier League's reputation and developments in global media technologies. Astute management of club resources is identified as the major factor in global brand management.

This research serves to determine causal configurations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) conditions that best influences grassroots football club stakeholders to meet a sponsor's goals through promotional activity.

The research uses a case study of the Essex Alliance League, a local amateur football league in England. Firstly, semi-structured interviews were held with multiple stakeholders to understand the ecosystem of grassroots football. From here, further semi-structured interviews were held with club sponsors to identify the conditions of CSR. This allowed the research to then issue a survey from which results were analysed and discussed using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA).

The ecosystem of grassroots football is formed by a myriad of stakeholders operating at a national level, all the way to more local governance structures within which the business-club relationship exists. Sponsors identified three main conditions of CSR: shared values, self-congruity, and happiness. However, following fsQCA, two pathways were found: (1) presence of shared values, and (2) presence of happiness with the absence of self-congruity.

For practitioners, adaptations can be made for clubs to attract and maintain sponsorship as businesses seek to use grassroots sport as a channel for their own CSR objectives. To attract long term sponsorship, club managers are recommended to maintain long-term relationships with business owners especially in relation to personal values, fit, and happiness. As such, the responsibility of the club to ensure its stakeholders engage in promotional activity on behalf of their sponsor will help in maximising the financial value over multiple seasons.

Where fertile ground for academic analysis in grassroots football is present, this research investigates CSR activity at this level of football, where most research is more concerned with professional levels of the game. Furthermore, this research reaches into the sport ecosystem through an understanding of co-created values between organisations in this exchange of shared values to meet common objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the managerial challenges of shared brands, defined as arrangements whereby a single brand name acts as the sole or principal identity for the products of two or more firms, and where brand management is governed by an entity independent from a single firm.

An exploratory, theory‐building approach is adopted. The paper draws from the brand equity and institutional economics literatures to develop a conceptualisation of club brands, of which shared brands represent one type. The managerial challenges for the latter are explored with reference to secondary evidence and two cases based in the food sector.

The analysis proposes that the exclusive and non‐rivalrous characteristics of club brands pose specific managerial challenges in the key decision‐making phases of brand identity creation, reputation building and reputation protection. Case exploration of shared brands illustrates these challenges, although some are attributed to the distinct governance structure of shared brands rather than their club characteristics.

Through a focus on shared brands, the paper offers an original exploration of a type of branding arrangement which has been overlooked in the literature, but whose use is growing amongst practitioners. It also offers a novel conceptualisation of brands that highlights the bias towards individualism in mainstream branding theory and its preoccupation with customer‐facing managerial tasks.

Increasingly there has been a blurring of the boundaries between competition and cooperation in many sectors of the global economy. This trend has not escaped the tourism industry. Indeed, numerous examples exist where major players in the transportation, accomodation, and telecommunications sectors have joined forces.

This paper aims to contribute to the concept of co-branding by recognising the role of consumer perception and the importance of the variety of contexts in which co-branding is perceived. This is done by studying the way in which two service brands cooperate. A framework based upon previous research is contextualised into 'service branding' and used to investigate the associations between Hong Kong and the Olympic Equestrian Games.

This study aims to investigate drivers of co-branding, and the relative strength of these drivers within the Persian Gulf Pro League (PGPL). The study examines sport sponsorship, and specifically the relationship between professional football teams and on-field apparel sponsors.

Sixteen experts participated in semi-structured interviews and ranked the co-branding drivers. The expert opinions were organized into estimates and triangular fuzzy numbers were established before the Mamdani Fuzzy Inference System converted the fuzzy outputs into crisp output values using the Centroid method. Next, the rankings of the drivers by the same 16 participants were analyzed using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP).

The study identified four main factors with 19 indicators: brand management (i.e. enhancing brand value, utilizing the knowledge and experience of partner brands, brand position, brand identity, brand equity and brand image), partner relationships (i.e. satisfaction, mutual trust, commitment, common interest, product reliability and innovative strategies), marketing factors (i.e. marketing mix, market position, competitive advantage and entry into new domestic markets) and supporting factors (i.e. copyright, contracts and social media law). The AHP identified the most influential factors as marketing, partner relationships, brand management and support.

Based on the study’s findings, the authors recommend that PGPL teams adopt a partnership mindset, seek alignment of values and recognize the plurality of stakeholders to a sponsorship and their relationships to each other. The study highlights the challenges of co-branding activities in a developing country where trademark laws are not well developed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of brand associations and the formation of attitudes towards a new sponsor. Specifically, the paper evaluates the Under Armour brand and its anomalous position in the Barclay’s Premier League.

The research design is longitudinal, qualitative and interpretivistic, utilising 26 online focus groups with 213 participants over a 24-month period encompassing the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 Premier League seasons.

The results indicate that Under Armour’s lack of football (soccer) presence in the context of the Premier League offered significant differentiation, as it diminished “common ground” with other fans, offered the opportunity to create personal identities beyond the club and the consumption of kit apparel, and was seen as positive given the articulation that brands such as Nike and Adidas were “forced” onto fans. Additionally, for the first time in the sports sponsorship literature, the findings reveal fans engaging with brands in a utilitarian manner, expressing concerns relating to cost, durability, functionality and value for money.

This study is exploratory in nature and highly contextualised, and a larger-scale study of the phenomenon is desirable. This study extends the literature on fans’ perceptions of sponsoring brands and shows that a new sponsor, without prior league or club associations, can generate significant brand interest and elicit consumption behaviours beyond team apparel.

The findings suggest that there are considerable opportunities for “outside” brands to garner a market share and instigate loyalty through sponsorship. Subsequently, kit manufacturers should consider strategies that encompass entry into new sporting areas.

The study reveals that fans seek uniqueness and differentiation in a sponsoring brand, with brand image paramount in relation to the club and to both social and personal identity.