Leveraging Brands In Sport Business

This edited text compiles advanced material relating to strategy and marketing in the field of sports business. Featuring contributions from experts across the sports business field, the book approaches strategy from the standpoint of managing and marketing a brand. With integrated current-day examples highlighting practices and issues, as well as ‘real-world’ applied video cases, this book is ideal for marketing students and sports business practitioners looking to gain strategic insights into the industry.

In a sporting world dominated by media and money, an understanding of sport branding is an essential skill for any sport manager. Success means being able to ‘brand’ – and therefore differentiate – a sport club, player, code, or event in a highly competitive entertainment market. For anyone seeking to understand or manage sport, this book offers an immediate and salient insight into the complex and dynamic process of creating a powerful sport brand. The book explains how a sport brand goes beyond just an identifying badge, reinforced by a name or a logo that helps sport consumers recognise a product or an organisation. It reveals how a brand becomes linked with consumers’ opinions and perceptions of a sport product and the organisation that owns it. Readers will learn how to create a powerful brand that has both recognition in the market and strong associated imagery, by imbuing it with a spirit of the past through appeals to tradition, by endowing it with human qualities of emotionality, thought, and volition, and through the use of characters, colours, texts, and symbols. It also provides a brief guide to the new domains of digital sport branding and social media. Concise, informative, and entertaining, this is an essential resource for anyone exploring or practising the business of sport.

The second edition of Branded: Branding in Sport Business examines significant brands associated with the sport industry. The brands profiled in this work identify successful practices that have been utilized in the business of sport to cultivate brand equity. The concept of branding is significant and has generated great interest in academic and professional circles. The notion of branding encompasses aspects such as collective images, messages, associations, and other characteristics associated with organizations, products, and people. The breadth of information presented in this work provides points of discussion and further examination pertaining to significant branding considerations impacting the sport industry.​​

The Sport Business Handbook provides perspectives from more than 100 of the most prominent figures in the sport industry. Plentiful examples and stories, including insiders' views of major sport deals, make this book a bible of information for those looking to advance their careers in this field.

The SAGE Handbook of Sport Management draws together the best current research on the major topics relevant to the field of sports management, including leadership, gender, diversity, development, policy, tourism, and media. Edited by two of the most respected figures in the field, the handbook includes contributions from leading sport management academics from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA, the UK and Europe.

Combining the latest branding research with a diverse range of powerful case examples, this book reveals the cutting edge techniques of value co-creation, personalisation and customer engagement employed by sport’s leading brands. Based on the transferable lessons that emanate from these practices, Brand Fans explores and illuminates how firms can cultivate connected fans and lifelong advocates, while building brand equity exponentially in the process. This is a book that will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike, as well as anyone fascinated by modern marketing, consumer relationships and branding.

Now available in a fully revised and updated fourth edition, Sport Management: Principles and Applications introduces the sport industry and examines the role of the state, non-profit and professional sectors in sport. It focuses on core management principles and their application in a sporting context, highlighting the unique challenges faced in a career in sport management. Written in an engaging and accessible style, each chapter has a clear structure designed to make key information and concepts simple to find and to utilize. Chapters contain a conceptual overview, references, further reading, links to important websites, study questions and up-to-date case studies from around the world to show how theory works in the real world, and a companion website offers additional activities for students and guidance notes and slides for instructors. The book covers every core functional area of management, including: strategic planning organizational culture organizational structures human resource management leadership governance financial management marketing performance management. This fourth edition also includes expanded coverage of sport media, change management and other contemporary management issues, providing a comprehensive introduction to the practical application of management principles within sport organizations. It is ideal for first and second year students on sport management related courses, as well as those studying business-focused or human movement courses seeking an overview of applied sport management principles.

Sport brands are a central element of modern sport business and a ubiquitous component of contemporary global culture. This groundbreaking book offers a complete analysis of the topic of sport brands from both a marketing management approach (strategy and implementation) and a psycho-sociological approach (consumption and wider society). In doing so it explores both supply and demand sides, offering a complete introduction to the nature, purpose and value of sport brands not found in any other sports marketing text. The book covers the whole heterogeneity of sport brands, going much further than the sport team and league brands covered in most other books. As well as teams and leagues, the book considers the brands of sports celebrities, events, media, computer games and governing bodies, as well as the ethical, professional and technological 'label brands' associated with sport. Richly illustrated with cases, examples and data, the book explores the tangible and intangible influence of sport brands, their economic and social value, and the subcultures and communities that grow up around them. It also introduces common strategies for growing brands, and growing through brands, and examines the challenges and threats that sport brands face, from boycotts and ambush marketing to counterfeiting. An understanding of sport brands is essential for a fully rounded understanding of contemporary sport marketing. As a result, this book is important reading for any student or practitioner working in sport marketing, sport business, or mainstream marketing management.