Search results

A career at the professional, elite level in sports does not last forever. One way or another, the day comes when players have to hang up their boots and move on, but to what? Some stay in the sport as managers or coaches, become broadcast announcers, or use their name recognition to pitch a product. However, for many their future opportunities lie in entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of the entrepreneurial learning needs of professional rugby players preparing for a career transition and asks the following questions: What are the specific needs of professional athletes in relation to entrepreneurial learning?, and, what are the key elements of designing an entrepreneurship programme to meet these needs?

The author adopted an interpretivist philosophical standpoint for this research, with an inductive research approach to explore various components of a tailored entrepreneurship training programme called the “Certificate in Enterprise Potential” (CEP) using the process of emergent inquiry. This programme was designed specifically for professional rugby athletes in Ireland. In gathering the data for the case study, the author pursued established principles of data collection, and used multiple sources of evidence.

The findings provide evidence of the entrepreneurial learning needs of professional athletes in career transition and identifies the key elements to be considered when designing an entrepreneurship programme to meet these needs. The findings are presented under the headings context, objectives and outcomes, audience, content, pedagogy, assessment and evaluation.

There are multiple implications from this study. For entrepreneurship educators, the various components of designing a tailored entrepreneurship programme for professional athletes are identified and outlined. For researchers, it opens the door for research with other sports people from different contexts. For professional athletes and professionals working with athletes, it provides evidence of a non-athletic and an entrepreneurial career transition model that builds on the player’s social identity, social networks and taps into an existing HEI entrepreneurship ecosystem. The research was confined to a single case study for a specific target audience and needs replication with other cohorts in order to reduce the chance of these findings being unique to one single case.

This paper focuses on the career transition and mid-career aspect of entrepreneurship education and in particular the career transition needs of the professional athletes. These findings provide a deeper understanding of mid-career entrepreneurship education, specifically in the contexts of professional athletes and HEI’s. Many athletes are forced to end their sporting careers early and with little hope of a meaningful or alternative long-term career options. This paper goes some way in addressing this concern.

The purpose of this paper exploratory study is to decipher sport consumer associations and sentiments connected to the brand image of retired athletes.

In total, 14 sport consumers, who demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of throwback branding tactics and expertise in athlete brand promotion, participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews.

The findings indicate there are three prevalent themes across the present data (i.e. epoch epitome, athlete-team connection and off-the-field persona).

While the proliferation of throwback merchandise and affinity for brands of retired athletes is evident, the internalization of associations related to retired athletes has escaped empirical investigation. Numerous questions concerning how specific facets of a retired athlete’s image (e.g. athletic skills or life off the field) activate nostalgic feelings, drive consumer loyalty and establish market permanence remain unanswered. The current study contributes to the understanding of the brand image of the retired athlete and the existing literature concerning athlete branding.

While conceived to examine key factors affecting post-retirement career advancement of retired elite athletes in South Korea, the purpose of this paper is to report how English, as a de facto global lingua franca, functions as a powerful gatekeeper in the sports administration field.

Interpreted through the lens of Bourdieu’s linguistic capital and Gramsci’s hegemony of language, the present study draws on content analysis of semi-structured individual interviews, as well as focus group interviews, conducted with thirty former South Korean elite athletes.

Based on the data analysis, systematic bias toward athletes was uncovered, privileging English as the single determining factor for employment. Furthermore, the educational implications for adult learners of English as a Foreign or English an Additional Language reveal unrealistic expectations of top–down language policies.

Perspectives of athlete participants, an underrepresented group in educational research, within the South Korean globalization context shed critical light on the pervasive aspects of English hegemony and its unexamined dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among an individual athlete’s brand equity, overall spectator satisfaction at sporting events and behavioral intentions.

The convenience sampling method was used when approaching potential participants among spectators of the LG Whisen Rhythmic All Stars 2013, a sporting event in which celebrated sports players perform choreographed dance routines. A total of 350 surveys were completed in Go-Yang, South Korea. Of the surveys collected, 20 were discarded due to excessive missing values, resulting in 330 usable surveys.

Using structural equation modeling, this study found that the brand equity of an individual athlete positively and directly affects the overall sporting event satisfaction and behavioral intentions, including re-purchase and word-of-mouth intentions among event attendees, which are factors that are mediated indirectly by satisfaction.

This study shows that the brand equity of an individual athlete can increase the spectator satisfaction levels in a similar manner to the brand equity of a sports team or product.

The use of sport celebrities for product endorsements in marketing communications vehicles is not new but there is limited literature on the increasing use by contemporary corporations of athletes with questionable or “negative” reputations. This paper raises questions about a seemingly cyclical trend and suggests marketers may continue this activity despite consumer and journalistic criticism. An explanation of the behavioral response to a 'controversial' endorsers' image (relative to the perceptions held by a particular demographic segment) and the opportunity for that relationship to translate favorably for the associated brand, is also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to extend previous research into sport celebrity endorsements by investigating such endorsements of products ultimately sold by retailers. This is done by updating previous research involving print media in sporting magazines.

A content analysis approach is used, examining advertisements in randomly selected issues of sports illustrated from the most recent full six years of publication.

Changes in the frequency of advertisements using sports celebrities were found compared to previous studies. Additionally, it appears that products which are ultimately sold by retailers are endorsed more frequently by celebrities in certain sports than others.

By including in the investigation the topics of sport played and consumer products, the paper extends the current literature to explore the advertisers' use of athlete endorsers with products directly and indirectly impacting retailers.

Matching celebrity athletes with potential endorsement opportunities is often difficult. Yet there are easy-touse survey-based methods available. Based on a survey of the general public in New Zealand, this study uses both Ohanian's source-credibility scale and a constant-sum scale to help brand managers, player agents and advertising practitioners select good celebrity athlete-product fit. Four New Zealand athletes (two males and two females) and several products were included in the test. Results show that the female celebrity athletes outperformed their male counterparts as potential endorsers. Use of Ohanian's multi-attribute scale yields a level of richness and insight, prompting us to advocate the use of both scales in the pursuit of endorser-product congruences.

The purpose of this article is to investigate sports branding at the personal level by focusing on the evolvement, growth and sustainability of the ANNIKA BRAND – an extension of Annika Sörenstam's success on golf courses worldwide.

A qualitative case study method inspired by “symbolic interactionist” aspects and focusing on Annika Sörenstam's commercial success with personal sports branding and its interdependence with sports branding at the product and corporate levels. Data collection was conducted in accordance with interpretative research traditions and hence based on qualitative semi‐ structured research interviews.

The “hybrid” nature of sports brands draws highly on “emotional capital” and “social currency”. Personal sports branding acts as a “hybrid”, which facilitates “hybrid” branding relationships between personal sports brands and sports brands at the product and corporate levels – often underlining good ROIs for all involved parties if the sports branding process is executed well strategically. This article presents personal sports branding as a hybrid phenomenon, which is dynamic by heart and part of a well‐coordinated process engaging several partners.

The practices and activities of the ANNIKA BRAND is a showcase for sports branding practitioners thinking about sustainable business models.

This paper is unique in offering a roadmap for how personal sport stars may approach brand development and growth while discussing key points of the interdependence between sports brands at the personal, product and corporate levels.

To measure the relationships between varieties of patriotism and fan reactions to anthem-linked athlete activism and to test the effects of teammate allyship.

In this study of US sport fans (n = 519), the authors examine whether two varieties of patriotism—the affective “symbolic patriotism” and the cognitive “uncritical patriotism”—might explain fans' reactions (support v. opposition) to anthem-linked athlete activism. The authors also consider whether fans' acceptance of nonactivist teammate allyship moderates patriotism influences on those reactions.

Using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), the authors posit and show that fans' reactions to athlete activism are driven more strongly by uncritical patriotism than by symbolic patriotism. The authors also show that fans' acceptance of nonactivist teammate allyship significantly moderate the strength and direction of fans' reactions to athlete activism.

The authors contribute substantive, new knowledge into the sways of athlete activism, teammate allyship and fan patriotism within the sport world. By way of novel heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations, the authors show evidence of discriminant validities of symbolic patriotism and uncritical patriotism. Using PLS-SEM moderation tests, the authors also show that fans' acceptance of teammate allyship moderates the influences of these patriotism types differently.

Few empirical studies to date have investigated sport fans' reactions to athletes' displays of social activism (e.g. taking a knee to protest racism).

This paper aims to extend the literature on wicked problems in consumer research by exploring athlete and consumer vulnerability in sport and the potential role that social marketing can play in addressing this problem.

This paper conceptualises the wicked problem of athlete and consumer vulnerability in sport, proposing a multi-theoretical approach to social marketing, incorporating insights from stakeholder theory, systems theory and cocreation to tackle this complex problem.

Sport provides a rich context for exploring a social marketing approach to a wicked problem, as it operates in a complex ecosystem with multiple stakeholders with differing, and sometimes conflicting, objectives. It is proposed that consumers, particularly those that are highly identified fans, are key stakeholders that have both facilitated the problematic nature of the sport system and been rendered vulnerable as a result. Further, a form of consumer vulnerability also extends to athletes as the evolution of the sport system has led them to engage in harmful consumption behaviours. Social marketing, with its strategic and multi-faceted focus on facilitating social good, is an apt approach to tackle behavioural change at multiple levels within the sport system.

Sport managers, public health practitioners and policymakers are given insight into the key drivers of a growing wicked problem as well as the potential for social marketing to mitigate harm.

This paper is the first to identify and explicate a wicked problem in sport. More generally it extends insight into wicked problems in consumer research by examining a case whereby the consumer is both complicit in, and made vulnerable by, the creation of a wicked problem. This paper is the first to explore the use of social marketing in managing wicked problems in sport.