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The ubiquity of social media provides sport organizations with opportunities to communicate with fans and as a result, potentially strengthen team identification. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to emerging research on the nature of social media use by sport organizations by examining the platforms adopted over a three-year period by National Basketball Association (NBA) teams and the way in which social media is used to communicate and engage with fans.

A content analysis was used to examine online comments posted by all 30 teams in the NBA on Facebook and Twitter during the off-season.

The results demonstrate that NBA teams have embraced social media, primarily using four different types of communication to engage fans: Informing, Marketing, Personalizing and Activating.

The authors establish that social media is an effective vehicle for sport organizations to engage with fans and to enhance team identification. The data suggests that teams should make a concerted effort in their communications, where possible, to personalize communications, genuinely inform and involve fans and provide relevant marketing communications, all of which can be effectively implemented within existing marketing efforts.

This is the first study to examine the direct use of social media by sport organizations and its potential for enhancing team identification.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for team selling to sports firms that can be used to more effectively select members for sales and CRM teams and improve the performance of teams in attracting and retaining premium seating customers.

The paper provides a two‐stage framework based on the personal selling process and the activities that support CRM programs. Recommendations are guided by the sport marketing and team selling literature streams and by best practices in sport marketing.

The paper recommends the formation of two teams (personal selling and CRM) during the customer relationship cycle and provides guidelines for team member selection based on the critical activities that occur during the personal selling and CRM processes. Key success factors are provided, including the establishment of a customer‐focused organization and effective communication practices among team members and between selling teams.

Although the use of selling teams is gaining popularity in several industries, the broader sales literature lacks research that can support the development and effective management of selling teams. Within the sport marketing literature, there is no research on selling teams. The main academic contribution of the paper is the cross‐disciplinary merging of existing team selling research in the sales literature with current research and industry information on marketing and sales by sport organizations (luxury suite sales). For the practitioner, the framework provides guidance on effective team member selection and best practices for the effective management of selling teams.

The study aims to identify critical factors that influence football fans’ support of their favorite team by examining the impact of social responsibility, brand credibility and team brand equity on patronage intentions of professional football teams.

An online survey collected data from 331 football fans of the Persian Gulf Premier League (PGPL) in Iran. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The findings revealed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is able to influence brand equity, brand credibility and patronage intentions. Also, brand equity and brand credibility were found to be positively related to patronage intentions. In addition to that, the findings show that brand equity and team credibility partially mediate the relationship between CSR and patronage intentions.

The findings provide valuable insights to sports teams/club managers aiming to attract new fans and retain current ones by investing in CSR and enhancing brand credibility and equity. Strategies to integrate CSR into relationship marketing and brand management are outlined.

This study empirically highlights the critical role of adhering to CSR and the effects of brand credibility and equity in enhancing patronage intentions among football team fans.

The purpose of this commentary is to discuss a framework (the Revised Model of Sport Consumer Behavior – R-MSCB; Trail, 2019) to accomplish the following objectives. (1) Provide a framework for sport marketers and sport organizations to use in their own market research. (2) Designate the processes needed to generate results and knowledge that sport organizations, sport marketers and associated corporate partners can use to improve marketing campaigns. (3) Provide suggestions for analytic techniques and measurement constructs/instruments that will facilitate market research within the sport industry.

The author created a 140-item questionnaire for the pre-survey and a 50-item questionnaire for the post-survey. The pre-survey was given at the beginning of the season, and the post-survey was given at the end of the season. The research group has generated a sequence of 13 studies and has collected pre-survey responses from over 7,800 people across 4 continents, 8 sports and 13 teams (data collections), with more teams still planned and over 2,000 post-season survey responses with data collection continuing.

This project, with its 13 studies, will provide sport organizations with the theories/frameworks, knowledge and processes to do their own market research in a more effective and efficient manner and will show sport organizations how to understand the complexities of sport consumer behavior, the motivations behind it and how it varies extensively across individuals. The author will show sports organizations how to collect data from their consumers using valid and reliable measures and constructs that will allow them to segment their consumers, how to effectively market to those segments and how to establish long-lasting relationships that make a satisfied and loyal customer.

This paper provides the framework and guidelines so that sport marketers and researchers can identify specific variables, constructs and relationships that will further their own objectives when attempting to explain sport consumer behavior. Using their own market research, they can implement the results/output in association with the Communications Strategy Model to create more effective and efficient marketing and communications campaigns and consequently drive key performance indicators (KPIs) and improve revenue streams.

Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by sport organizations in the community recovery efforts in Boston following the 2013 marathon bombings.

Interview questions were created following initial site visits and content analysis of 40 media reports specifically dealing with social recovery efforts following the attacks. Six semi-structured interviews with professional team and organizational leaders were completed and analyzed to gain insight into the leader’s perspectives of the relief process. Finally, the media reports and interviews were reviewed and specific recovery efforts were classified into tangible, emotional, or informational support categories.

The findings of this case study are specific to the disaster relief efforts in Boston, Massachusetts following the 2013 marathon bombings and therefore cannot be generalized beyond this scope. This paper provided focussed analysis of the reactions of several Boston area sport organizations during the immediate disaster recovery period. The long-term impacts of these efforts require further investigation.

The examination of the viewpoints of the sport organization leaders following the disaster may provide insight for other sport organization leaders and civic officials as they prepare for future challenges.

This paper provides a detailed examination of several sport organizations responses following the community disaster in Boston. It also provides unique perspectives from the sport organization leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to clearly outline the practicalities of designing and implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) through sport programmes via stakeholder involvement theory by an international governing body operating across Europe’s multicultural setting. The concept of CSR and the use of sport to achieve the objectives of CSR have become common buzzwords. Within CSR, most of the academic literature, or research, has focused on defining or framing CSR through sport particularly discussing the implementation or staging of CSR activities by both sporting and non-sporting organisations. However, not much has been done regarding the practicalities of designing CSR programmes by employing stakeholder involvement theory and conducting of a thorough needs analysis before programme deployment.

This explorative study is based on participatory action research informed by international sport-for-development experiences. A qualitative approach was adopted in assessing the application of stakeholder involvement theory (Morsing and Schultz, 2006) in programme design and assessment of the target group’s needs.

The old CSR approach was fragmented and lacked integration into local area needs. The new CSR approach ensures that community needs are reflected in CSR activities. The delivery of CSR by Euroleague Basketball professional clubs secures a licence to operate through joined-up approaches with mainstream partner agencies. These social partnerships instil a sense of community ownership of One Team Basketball projects.

This paper draws on lessons learnt from international sport-for-development sector where stakeholder involvement is vital for deploying development-through-sport initiatives. The paper addresses aspects which constitute sustainable developmental approaches in communities using sport CSR as a vehicle for change.

Building on prior research in interactions between sales and marketing departments, the purpose of this paper is to investigate departmental alignment among professional hockey teams. By using a single industry sample, the authors are able to identify high and low performers, along with structural antecedents that lead to higher alignment (Rouse and Daellenbach, 1999). Expiring inventory, customer knowledge, and volatile demand enhance the need for alignment and suggest opportunities for innovative mechanisms to share information among departments (Mullin et al., 2007).

Through the usage of Kotler et al.’s (2006) survey instrument, the authors survey NHL Vice Presidents of sales and marketing to assess levels of structural alignment. The authors further explores strategies for alignment through qualitative interviews of select team executives.

The authors find examples of high alignment, achieved through structural elements of proximity, cross-functional tasks, financial incentives, and new technologies. The qualitative interviews provide insight into how organizations attempt to create high levels of alignment.

These results help advance the literature by identifying high performers and going inside organizations for the source of a competitive advantage, thus following Rouse and Dallenbach’s (1999) approach for theory development. The authors also contributes by identifying strategies for practitioners to apply as they attempt to design optimal work structures.

This investigation's purpose is to compare coverage of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and Major League Soccer (MLS). The goals are (1) to extend CSR analyses beyond organizational reports and (2) to compare coverage of professional sports teams' CSR behaviors across genders.

Specifically, this quantitative content analysis compared local newspaper coverage of the socially responsible behaviors of the three NWSL and MLS teams owned and operated by the same organizations in Portland, Houston and Orlando.

The NWSL teams received significantly less and more negative coverage than the MLS teams. Moreover, the NWSL coverage was more individualistic, more focused on ethics and quoted individual team players more frequently, while the MLS coverage was more collective, focused on philanthropy and quoted team organization members more frequently.

Although intentionally based on a sample of six teams, this study's results suggest the biases in coverage of women's sports teams extend beyond the playing field to their corporate social responsibility behaviors, reporting and news coverage.

As one of the first studies to analyze media coverage of professional sports team's CSR activities and to compare their socially responsible behaviors across genders, the results provide compelling implications for CSR scholars and practitioners, especially in the sports industry.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of social media strategies of sport organizations when an unexpected absence of relevant content occurs. The study explored the typologies of Instagram posts of NHL teams and measured engagement of social media content that was not planned in advance.

A mixed methods approach was utilized through a content analysis of 12 NHL team social media feeds. 502 (n = 502) posts were examined from the period of March 12 – May 26 during which the NHL season was suddenly paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typologies of posts were identified through a qualitative coding process and ANOVA tests were conducted to examine the effectiveness of each typology in engaging consumers.

This study found that social media strategies of the sampled NHL teams is evidence of disinnovation with digital, as opposed to the previously conceptualized innovative properties that these activities bear. Therefore, in order to achieve the consumer engagement outcomes sought to build stronger relationships with fans and deliver on the expected leveraging capabilities for sponsors, sport marketers must reconsider their current, imbalanced approach and whether the more inherently interactive content should be balanced with entertaining content that requires organic consumer engagement.

This study offers a unique application of UGT, highlighting that social media in a sport context is not just about gratifying consumers, but preventing diminishing engagement and exploitation of users through overuse of sponsorship-laced content.