• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Building brands and brand equity

This is an excerpt from Sport Marketing 6th Edition With HKPropel Access by Windy Dees,Patrick Walsh,Chad D McEvoy,Steve McKelvey.

One of the key elements of building a brand is developing a strong, favorable, and unique image. When a sport organization is able to achieve this, it realizes brand equity. At first look, brand equity is a relatively simple concept, but in practice requires a well-designed strategic approach and decision making to achieve. According to David Aaker, a leading expert on branding, brand equity is “a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers.”8 Nike, ESPN, Adidas, and Gatorade are good examples. Put their name or image on a product and it is worth more than a generic product of similar quality due to factors such as their brand awareness, what people associate with the brand, the perceived quality of the brand, and brand loyalty. That is just one of the many benefits of developing positive brand equity.

Benefits of Brand Equity

When a team, such as Manchester United of the English Premier League, is able to generate a wealth of assets linked to its brand, the team is thought to have high brand equity. This position is the ultimate goal for the sport franchise manager because a number of benefits result from having high brand equity. Perhaps most important, loyalty to the team brand increases when brand equity is high. For example, take the Chicago Cubs, who won its first World Series title in over 100 years in 2016. Despite such a long championship drought, and many years of being dubbed “the lovable losers,” the Cubs still regularly sold out its home games in Wrigley Field before the 2016 championship. The Cubs have a strong brand because of noteworthy brand assets, such as Wrigley Field, which is located in an appealing Chicago neighborhood about one mile (1.6 km) from Lake Michigan and just a few miles from the downtown business district. Achieving a high level of brand loyalty allows the sport marketer to realize increases in revenue through ticket and merchandise sales. Brand loyalty also typically results in a larger viewing audience for events and larger social media followings, which, in turn, allow the sport organization to realize higher broadcast fees for the rights to televise a property’s games or events and attract more sponsors looking for widespread exposure.

The case of the Cubs also underscores the fact that winning is not the only important factor in the creation of brand loyalty. Research has documented that factors other than winning are more predictive of brand loyalty for North American professional sport teams.¹³ Researchers have documented that winning is not everything and that other factors contribute to the realization of ticket sales, corporate sponsorship sales, and other positive revenue outcomes.^13,14 In fact, sport marketers can create equity for their brands in a variety of ways, many of which are discussed later in this chapter. The important point here is that brand equity creates brand loyalty and building relationships with the customers of a sport organization can enhance the brand.

More Excerpts From Sport Marketing 6th Edition With HKPropel Access

---